I would like my app to be able to send a reminder email (or text) at various points in the future. I was thinking this might be doable with local notifications but now I am not seeing how. Any advice on a good strategy for making this happen? More details:
I am building an iPhone app, using Xcode. It is a small reminder app that will remind you to do something after a user-specified number of hours have passed. So you could set a reminder for yourself to TiVo the donkey races in 11 hours, for example, and the app would send out that reminder via email. I was hoping to keep the whole process within the phone. So the app would register an event (like a local notification) and use the Mail app to send the email.
If I have to go the server route I can always set up cron jobs but I am hoping to avoid that, because then I need to worry about scaling to many users. AN iMessage or a tweet might be a good alternative if that is more realistic.
Any thoughts?
According to my research (and I hope that someday I discover I am wrong) there is no way to schedule an email or a text or a tweet or any other communication for the future. One can use Local Notifications, but the available actions for this are to display a message on the device and play a sound. That’s it. The root issue is that you cannot execute code without your app being in the foreground and active. If anyone thinks I am wrong about this please chime in!