Sharing basic data between iPhone applications

Question

Is it possible to provide a common data store between two different iPhone applications signed by the same developer? I would like to develop an application in which one application for the iPhone will save a stream of data that can then be read by another application. Is it possible? Many thanks!

Answer 1

No, It is Immpossible. The iPhone application runs in a sandboxed environment and although it does not have access to the data store of other applications.

Edit:

After reading the rest of the answers here: Yes, custom URLs can be configured. And yes, it is possible to transfer data with it, but, in my opinion, I would not recommend this procedure to transfer more than 5 KB of data. No uptime: no transactions and no relationships.

Answer 2

Now in iOS 5 with iCloud, you can register both apps with the same iCloud URL. When the second application is initialized, the main data store of the first is more or less copied to the second. This may take some time, so you need to run a persistent storage controller in the background thread, or the application will be killed by a watchdog.

However, there are a few caveats.

• It does not work properly. Some entries from the master data database do not seem to be copied. In my experience, it seems coincidental that recordings do not. Perhaps this is due to the consistency of the original store.

• after this application does not seem to sync, unlike the same application on two different iDevices.

Debugging is a bit of a pain, because it takes 10-20 seconds before the transition from one iDevice is transferred to another, and apparently indefinitely, before the change from one application on the same iDevice moves to another application registered with using the same iCloud url.

So, you can copy most of your recordings using iCloud at the beginning of the second application, but it's hard to sync them.

Answer 3

This can be done using a special iphone URL scheme with some caveats.

If you use a custom URL scheme, only one application "owns" the data. Another application would have to import data from the main application ... Mobile Orchard made an article about it to move data from a simple application to a paid application

http://www.mobileorchard.com/lite-to-paid-iphone-application-data-migrations-with-custom-url-handlers/

But I recently stumbled upon a MIT licensed library called "SwapKit" that can do exactly what you want ... Sounds good from a review on their website, although I haven't tried this:

http://infinite-labs.net/swapkit/

and this may or may not be any help, but also check out "SpyPhone":

SpyPhone shows a data view a fraudulent application may collect non-jailbroken iPhone.

http://github.com/nst/SpyPhone

Answer 4

You can use a custom URL scheme to send data to the second application.

-t

Answer 5

There's also a system board (I think it's NSPasteboard or something else, no time to check right now), which is basically a clipboard. I think you can put everything on it and then run another application with a URL that tells the other application to check the file.