Opening one app from another app without closing the app

Question

hi,

In the home page of my iphone app, there is a button added. When that button is clicked some other iphone app needs to be opened in a new viewcontroller (with out closing the parent app).There will be a back button on this view controller. When the back button is clicked, the new viewcontroller which is showing the another app needs to be closed and our parent app's home page needs to be shown.

Please give me some ideas on how to do this. I googled for this i didnt get any solutions.

Thanks, Raja.

Answer 1

-- the following applies to iOS versions previous than 4.0 :)

Actually, there can be only one iPhone application running at once (with exceptions of Safari, Phone and some other system applications). The iPhone Human Interface Guidelines say so:

Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits.

However, if you only need to e.g. show a webpage, you can do it using UIWebView

Also, if you need to open another application, you should use URLs as pointed by Steve Harrison. This will, however, close your application. The recommended behavior in this case is to remember your application state and restore it when the application is run again, as Nithin writes.

Answer 2

I don't think that you can run other iPhone apps within your own one. It doesn't make sense. You can open another iPhone app via a URL (see here and here), but this will close your app.

Answer 3

According to apples documentation, they are not allowing any applications to be run in the background, except system generated ones. So you will be unable to do the thing you are going to implement. However, there is one thing that can make the same result. You told that you are calling other application to run on a button click. Before initiating that application, save the current state of your application, may be using sqlite3 or core-data, and then open the other one. While returning back, load the pre-saved data from the database or wherever you have stored it. Every time you start the application, you check for the persisted data, if exists, load it or otherwise load your basic view

Answer 4

Like it has been stated: running two apps is not allowed by apple. You can however implement this apps features into you're app and have both get and save data to the same server...

Or like Nithin said: this functionality is available on JB iphones. Look into "backgrounder" for implementing one solution for normal users and one for thouse that has jailbroken.