Question

I’m wondering if it’s possible to make an iphone app give the user an alert in a certain time without being run in the background or using notifications?

I see it happening in an app called iPray Pro. It gives an alert for the prayer time even though it’s not running in the background or using notifications. I checked under the Setting-Notifications and the app is not there at all.

How is it done?

Answer 1

Look for Local Notifications in the iOS documentation. They are like push notifications, but don’t require a server. They are quite simple API to use too; make a UILocalNotification and use the scheduleLocalNotification: method on UIApplication to add the notification onto the system.

It will then fire in accordance to the fireDate property of the local notification you scheduled.

Local Notifications require iOS4.0 or later.