iOS 2020 Requirements - Is your App Ready?
Srihari Kulkarni April 01, 2020
MobileFirst_Platform Mobile_Foundation iOS
During the last several months, Apple has made a few announcements that can affect your app. This post lists the announcements that are most relevant and also the actions you must take to keep your Mobile Foundation app current.
Usage of UIWebView
Even after deprecating UIWebView, iOS devices have been tolerant of apps using UIWebView until now. iOS 13 was no different. However, with this announcement, Apple made it very clear that the App Store will stop accepting new apps that use UIWebView APIs starting April 2020 and updates to existing apps starting December 2020.
This post has extensive details on how to deal with this in your Mobile Foundation app. TL;DR update your Mobile Foundation v8.0 SDKs for native iOS or Cordova/Ionic apps to the latest SDK. If you’re on MobileFirst v7.1 hybrid platform, it is time to migrate to v8.0 as the new requirements are not supported in MobileFirst v7.1.
Push Notifications
If you’ve been using MobileFirst Platform for sending out push notifications, more likely than not, you’re using the certificate-based binary protocol for APNS. However, this announcement from Apple, brings down the curtains on the legacy binary protocol starting November 2020 and instead chooses the HTTP/2 based protocol as its replacement. As always, MobileFirst Platform has this covered. Read this post and fix your app.
Use of Adaptive User Interfaces
Yet another requirement for apps to make it to the App Store is that all apps must make use of an XCode Storyboard for the app’s launch screen and all apps must have adaptive user interfaces to support any display size. Head over to this Apple Developer post for the original announcement. Now, what does this mean for your Mobile Foundation app? Well, native apps are not affected by the MobileFirst SDK. However, if you’re using MobileFirst v7.1 Hybrid apps, then you will have to upgrade your MobileFirst Studio to version 7.1.0.0-IF202003301225 or later. As always, don’t forget to rebuild your environment after upgrading.
Other App Store requirements
Among other App Store requirements, all apps submitted to the App Store starting 10 April, 2020 must be built using iOS 13 or a later SDK. You can read about this announcement here.
Further updates to the App Store guidelines specific to HTML5 apps (MobileFirst Hybrid or Cordova apps), have been in place since 3 March, 2020. Read about them here.
Inclusive terminology note: The Mobile First Platform team is making changes to support the IBM® initiative to replace racially biased and other discriminatory language in our code and content with more inclusive language. While IBM values the use of inclusive language, terms that are outside of IBM's direct influence are sometimes required for the sake of maintaining user understanding. As other industry leaders join IBM in embracing the use of inclusive language, IBM will continue to update the documentation to reflect those changes.