Comment by rgbrgb
12 years ago
I couldn't agree with you more. There was huge version fragmentation for my apps, and this is going to totally take care of that. I had been thinking about doing some kind of hybrid web view thing to compensate for the lack of automatic updates. This is a huge win for me personally as well because I have like 24 app updates all the time.
Still, it would be nice to have more composability in apps. I'm working on a UI plugin / framework for apps and I really wish that I could do incremental updates without developers having to redeploy their entire app. If only you could include app dependencies so that when you downloaded an app that used Dropbox, for example, it would download Dropbox too. That way, when Dropbox wanted to update their SDK, they could just push an update to their app instead.
I've been using the hybrid native/web approach to circumvent the downloads as well. I didn't go so far as push actual UI a la HTML to load in a webview, but I made dynamic native UIs that changed according to certain responses made on startup (think sending a news update with a picture url loaded into a UILabel/UIImageView)
The composability point is interesting. I like the idea of dependencies, and I've used url schemes to do it. You can test for whether or not an app is installed (given that it has a scheme) by testing invoking - (BOOL)canOpenURL:(NSURL *)url from UIApplication. Something interesting would be for Apple to require that each app have a custom URL scheme, and possibly generate them from a unique app identifier.