We are creating a landing page of sorts for our iPhone/Android app and on this page there will be a link to each of the respective app stores. However, when the user is on a computer, it's a bit cumbersome to access the app stores (particularly Apple's app store). So we would like to add a "send text message to phone" feature like Groupon does on http://www.groupon.com/mobile.
Now, my questions with this are as follows:
A) What sort of code do I need to put in to make this feature work? Is this super intensive or are there free or cheap options available out there to do this for me?
B) How does the code know whether it is an iPhone or Android that it's texting? Groupon took me immediately to the Apple store on it's link. Tried going through the source code on Groupon but it was a bit beyond my grasp.
Thanks for any help!
A few different things are needed to get this up and running:
You should use something like Twilio to programmatically send text messages
You need a page on your server (say http://mydomain.com/app_redirect) that sniffs user agents and then redirects the user to either the iOS AppStore or Android store respectively
Once you have those pieces it's fairly simple
Create landing page like groupons
When the user posts their cell phone to your server call Twilio to send out a text message containing the link http://mydomain.com/app_redirect
When user taps the link it will open a webview, which will then redirect to the correct appstore url depending on the device
Related
An unauthorized person has created an android app on our name, logo and showing our website content as is. It has fully functional browser experience in an app. This person is using advertisement to make money using our content.
Our Website: http://www.chittorgarh.com
Fake App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=davidjack.chittorgarh
What we did in last 2 days:
Complaint to Google. No response so far.
Sent emails to fake app publisher. No response so far.
Created our own official app using exact same way and made it live. We will start pushing it through our website soon. It’s not what we want but do not see any other option.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ipo.chittorgarh
Question: How do disable all the traffic from the Fake App?
Tried User-Agent but no luck as it’s exactly same as someone opens the app in chrome on android.
It is basically a web browser within an app, so there isn’t any way around this, if it’s publicly accessible via the web then it’s available to anyone to access or implement within a web view.
All you can do really is create your own app, and add a message regarding the fake app on the homepage of your website.
I want do simple task. When I open website in mobile and click on this number it should ask for which app you want to use like dial, message or whats app. For single task I know how to do it. How to do it single URL?
8983160662
Hello, world!
contact
You cannot do this in a single URL. The prompt functionality you see when you click a phone number in some desktop browsers isn't present on mobile I don't think. Unless you get the user to hold down on the number where native options will kick in asking what they want to do with it, whereby WhatsApp, texting will probably be an option.
To achieve what you want you would need a link, that prompts your own custom made dialogue with JavaScript that acts on a certain url. ie. Whatsapp, Skype etc based on what the user chose.
So I'm thinking this may be impossible. But on each phone platform there is a convention to send an SMS link, that when clicked, will launch an application on the device and do something based on the parameters sent in the link.
Ex:
iPhone: Launch an app from a link in an SMS
Android: Launch Android app from within SMS/MMS message?
However is there anyway to do this that is effectively cross platform? For example I have an android phone with my app, and I send an invitation to a friend that has the same app but the iphone version (perhaps I don't know he has an iphone I just have a phone number). Is there a way to send a sms link that figures out it's being opened on an iphone, and sends the link to open the iphone version of the app? Perhaps there is a way to embed very simple logic into a hyperlink that changes based on what device it is? Is there any way to pull off something like this?
I realize I could send multiple links and have the user click the one that is appropriate, but that seems a little sloppy (especially as more platforms become available, it will be cumbersome to cram all the links into 1 SMS message for every device).
This is a difficult situation with no easy answer unfortunately.
Option A) You send a link that points to your server. This link identifies the device based on user agent and then forwards them to the proper sms: link for each platform.
Option B) If you know what type of device you are sending the link to beforehand, then you can determine the proper link on the server side before it is sent.
I am new to JQuery mobile .
Need some assistance to start with.
My plan is for a mobile application( cross platform android and Iphone ) which will get and update data to a webservice. This will be a set of htmls. I need to access gallery and camera so i think it should be integrated with PhoneGap.
Now the html pages are hosted in same domain as web service. While
integrating to Phonegap would like to know whether i need to move
Html to app or keep the htmls in remote server and put a web view to
load html from there. Basically in samples i have seen the app itself
with htmls , so would like to know best strategy.
In Android app there is a hardware back button. Basically i have
a login page, home page and detail pages. While in Home page if hardware back
button is pressed , i should ask for logout . I searched but dint get
idea to handle the same.
May be i will remove camera functionality and then it will be pure
JQuery Mobile and no Phonegap. SO this will be loaded in browser
directly in device. So if in JQuery mobile only also , can this hardware back
button be handled.
Please guide me in right direction.
-Thanks in advance
mia
In reply to your first point: the practice of hosting the full html pages in a remote server is usually forbidden by the app stores (at least iOS having read the guidelines recently).
You should instead only retrieve data from the server (in the form of json/xml for instance). For this very purpose you can create your mobile app using Backbone, or any other MVC/MVVC platform.
Your base pages will be in the app -displayed by phonegap webview- along with some templates. Every time the user goes to another page, you fetch some json data from the server and then process your data with the templates to generate full html.
This process makes more sense than serving full html pages (which is then more a mobile site than a mobile app) as only the data (what is dynamic) is sent from the server, which makes the payload smaller (better for mobile devices with limited bandwidth capabilities).
For the second point, I guess you mean when the app is closed or put in the background through this back button you want to call a logout function in your app. You'll need to catch a system event, but that's not something you can handle directly in Phonegap and you'll need some native java coding for that.. but first check the phonegap plugins for such feature but I haven't seen any.
For the third point, if you say you don't want to use phonegap your 'mobile app' will become only a 'mobile site'. which is fine, but then you'll have even less control over that "back button". You'll only be able to control web events like window close (beforeunload).
It is possible to have the full HTML on the server and I have had an app approved for the iOS app store with this method. However there are obvious downsides including the fact that you lose off-line capabilities.
You can add an event listener for the back button document.addEventListener('backbutton', onBackButton, false);
As far as I know you cannot handle the back button with a mobile site.
I'm looking at building functionality similar to Amazon's Appstore installation flow (http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000626391&ref=mas_gs) to get a user to install an apk without going through Google's App Market.
Basically, I would like to provide a web page form that accepts an email or phone number. In Amazon's case, when the user enters a phone number, it sends a notification to the phone with an actionable link that can be used to finally install an apk.
To build something similar, what is the best way to actually implement this so that the user receives an Android notification that is non-intrusive, but noticeable enough that they can expand it to complete the install process?
Note that at this point, the user does not yet have any version of the target app installed yet, so it's solely reliant on the user providing a phone number to reach them.
First Option:
You would need some kind of integration on your web site to be able to send sms.
A quick google search returned a site with a list of some possible services that can let you do that: http://mashable.com/2008/04/19/send-text-messages/
And you would sms a direct download link to the application wherever it's stored on your server.
Then they would download and install it.
Second Option:
Say screw the phone number business, and just have them click a download link on the website.
Third option:
Use email.
This link, another one I grabbed from google, might help with that: How do I send email from my website?
I don't really think there's any other way to do it, but I have never done web programming (other than simple html), so I don't really know that much on this topic.