I’ve been asked by a client to design a native iPad app that has a web-based admin panel that will be hosted somewhere on the Internet. I’d like to handle this by making the native app maintain a listening socket that the web app will connect to and communicate. But I’m not clear on Apple’s security here. Can an app on iOS listen for inbound connections from the network or is that one of those forbidden things?
you want the iOS app to act like a server ? (single or multiple connections is really immaterial here)
I’d guess this isn’t on the allowed list but I could easily be wrong
I think it might be. I installed an app on my Mum’s iPad to allow me to grander photos directly to it. On the other device you simply point a web browser to its IP address and voila.
There are httpsockets on iOS made with XCode in Objective-C or Swift.
I even filed a feature request for it, but after two years I have given any hope it will ever happen.
<https://xojo.com/issue/36856>
If you can’t listen, though you can always connect from the app to a server. It seems quite possible to regularly poll a webservice to know if the app should connect.