Question

I have an application which takes characters from a web page and compares them to a UILabel in the application. What I want to do is enable the app to continue to do this even when the user has placed the app in a suspended state. All I have found online and in the documentation is the way to schedule a UILocalNotification while still in the active state. In the documentation, it states that you can declare certain permissions in the info.plist. I looked at the categories, but my application cannot really fit any of those.
Is there a way for me to continue comparing the two strings and scheduling a notification while in the background?
Thanks.

Answer 1

iOS doesn’t really support multi-tasking in the manner you require. (i.e.: You can’t simply carry on processing data in the background unless you’re a very specific kind of app such as a VOIP service, etc.) otherwise you’re likely to end up being terminated.

However, one possible solution would be to carry our this monitoring on a separate system (e.g.: a web server that your app interacts with) rather than within the app itself. You’d therefore:

1. Communicate the required string/web page to your web service

2. Carry out the processing on the web server.

3. Send a push notification to your app if the string was found on the page in question.