How to know the apps installed in iPhone

Question

I am developing an application in which i need to find the apps which are already installed in iphone device such as Skype, facebook. I need to check it. Please give me code snippet if possible otherwise a link to get the solution. Is it possible or not.

If this is possible, then how to disable the app also...

Thanks in advance......

Answer 1

Tapbots does something similar but only with their own apps. They probably keep track of device UDIDs on a server of theirs by communicating with the server using each app, so they are able to show which of their apps are installed on a given device.

As mentioned, this only works for apps you make though, as you'll be the one programming such functionality into your apps. You cannot check the existence of apps made by others.

There are also no public APIs that allow you to disable other apps. And besides, as the others say, apps are all sandboxed to themselves.

By the way... if you're trying to disable those apps because they compete with yours... forget it. The legal implications that can and will follow are not pretty.

Answer 2

I don't think it's possible, as a result of being sandboxed into your own application's environment.

And I'm referring to applications in general, not applications made by you (as BoltClock mentioned), since you're referring to the facebook and skype apps, which I imagine aren't yours.

Answer 3

I question your reasons for doing this, especially disabling other apps. Apps are sandboxed into their own environment. Anything that breaks this would not be accepted into the App Store.

Answer 4

You can't check for any application, but you can actually check for applications which officialy shared their url scheme.

You can find the biggest database of those url schemes here. Now, how to use? All that we'll need is UIApplication. First, we need check if the iOS can open specific url:

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] canOpenURL:[NSURL urlWithString:@"fb://profile"]];

If this method returns yes then the user has the facebook application installed. To open the following application you need to call:

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL urlWithString:@"fb://profile"]];

Which will open your facebook profile on the facebook application.

Alas, there is no possibility of disabling any other application on the iOS, since each and every third party software is being sandboxed.

Hope this was helpful, Pawel