1

First off - our needs don't require any sort of interaction with the web view, we simply want to display content from the web.

Situation: we want to make a glorified slide show that pulls in web content. We were intending on having a list of templates shown to the user on the TV app, they can pick one, and then the appropriate URL is hit for that template (which would live on the web). The web portion would handle things from there, navigating to a new URL every X seconds (which just displays the next set of data in the same template)

In learning that web views are restricted, and you can't sneak an app submission by apple while utilizing a web view, we've hit a dead end. Having hundreds of templates that are all hard coded doesn't seem maintainable for us to do, plus we can't deliver a new template to users (er.. clients) without going through the potentially lengthy app approval process every time.

Does anyone have any other bright ideas for storing templates on the web, maybe even in a data format, that we can download and interpret/parse in-app to know where to position image views, labels, etc?

Thanks for any suggestions!

rmaddy
  • 314,917
  • 42
  • 532
  • 579
Brandon K
  • 11
  • 3
  • Did you see this? (this question is probably a dupe) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32503582/web-app-in-tvos – inorganik Jun 29 '16 at 17:28
  • I did see it, but the ideas suggested seem to point towards a guaranteed rejection of the app. Our needs seem a little different in that the only purpose of the webpage is to display images and text with zero navigation or user interaction needed within it. Thanks for the link though I suppose another question could be: is it possible to pull in TVML files from the web, or do they have to be deployed with the app? The whole goal here is to be able to make styling changes without having to do so in-app and resubmit, etc. – Brandon K Jun 29 '16 at 18:25

1 Answers1

0

I know I'm a little late to the party, but I wanted to answer your secondary question. It is absolutely possible to load TVML files from the web without updating the tvOS submitted app. We have a published tvOS app that is currently doing this.

As I recall, the tvOS app we submitted is very basic, with the only real change being the TVBaseURL. We placed all of our TVJS files on Google App Engine and the TVML files are in the GAE Storage bucket, so the TVBaseURL points to the public URL for those files. I have a cron job that reads an API and dynamically builds the TVML files several times a day. When the TVOS app runs, it loads the files from the GAE Storage bucket. The real benefit is that I can update the TVML layout and add or delete screens as needed without ever needing to go through the app submission process.

Dan
  • 322
  • 3
  • 9