Question

I am looking to make an iPhone/iPad/OSX/Windows capable application that wirelessly tracks inventory (primarily for companies) allowing the user(s) to track the inventory from every device. As I am just beginning in this field I am short on the cash aspect of things and this forces me to outsource the “wireless” aspect to other companies. I have had my eyes on Dropbox for a while but I don’t know entirely if it would be legal or conventional. I would like to charge a subscription fee for the syncing capabilities as well so it makes it that much more complicated. Does anyone see if this could work and if not then could you please point me toward a (more) viable solution.

Answer 1

iCloud would work well with this scenario and as far as I know you are free to charge for any feature in your app, regardless of if it is using a third party web service. I am not sure how you would access the iCloud documents within Windows though. Any Mac App should be able to access the same files though.

One question I would have for you use what you intend to do with the Core Data store on a Windows system? Core Data does a lot of heavy lifting as far as the data store integrity is concerned which generally makes it unideal to interact with said data store directly. If you want to have a database that is used and manipulated on all systems you might want to look into using SqlLite directly. If you can target only OSX systems you have Core Data in OSX and I believe you can interchange an iOS Core Data datastore and an OSX datastore, so long as you choose one that is available on both systems.

Regarding DropBox, again it is the feature you are charging for, not the service. You are required to develop the integration with your app so you should fairly be able to charge extra for that feature. You might run into some issues if you start charging for how much data can be synced or have some kind of tiered system.

Not sure if this answers the question clearly but hopefully it helps, perhaps leave some comments with more detailed questions and I will try to clear things up.

Update for comment

Are you intending to implement a custom datastore? I think this is a feature added with iOS5. As far as I understand you could charge for the iCloud feature in your App, I have not gone through the entire TOS/EULA for iCloud though so I would do the proper research before investing time in development. iCloud data access is strictly restricted to the iCloud user, so if you need “administrator” access to each user’s data then iCloud won’t work. You might find a weird situation here using DropBox as well. I would look into https://www.parse.com/ as a potential backend for your app.