How to Bring Application to Foreground in iOS

How to bring application to foreground in ios?

It cannot be done without user interaction. The only option is you can generate a push notification to tell the user to bring the application to foreground.

This is from the Apple documentation about this issue:

When the operating system delivers push notification (iOS or OS X)
and the target application is not running in the foreground, it
presents the notification (alert, icon badge number, sound). If there
is a notification alert and the user taps or clicks the action button
(or moves the action slider), the application launches and calls a
method to pass in the local-notification object or remote-notification
payload. If the application is running in the foreground when the
notification is delivered, the application delegate receives a local
or push notification.

Bring application to foreground in ios

By Configuring a Background Update Notification

form apple documents

Background update notifications improve the user experience by giving
you a way to wake up your app periodically so that it can refresh its
data in the background. When apps do not run for extended periods of
time, their data can become outdated. When the user finally launches
the app again, the outdated data must be replaced, which can cause a
delay in using the app. A background update notification can alert the
user or it can occur silently.

You can read more there Documentation

Possible to bring the app from background to foreground?

Update for Xcode 9: Starting in Xcode 9, you can now simply call activate() on any XCUIApplication.

let myApp = XCUIApplication()
myApp.activate() // bring to foreground

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xctest/xcuiapplication/2873317-activate

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Yes, it is. But, you'll need XCUIElement's private headers (which are available via header dump from Facebook here). In order to foreground the app, you need to call resolve which I believe resolves the element's query (which for applications means foregrounding the app).

For Swift, you'll have to import the XCUIElement.h into your bridging header. For Objective-C you'll just need to import XCUIElement.h.

With the app backgrounded:

Swift:

XCUIApplication().resolve()

Objective-C

[[XCUIApplication new] resolve];

If this is the only functionality you need, you could just write a quick ObjC category.

@interface XCUIElement (Tests)
- (void) resolve;
@end

If you need to launch / resolve another app. Facebook has an example of that here by going through the Springboard.

How to bring IOS app from background to foreground without using local notification?

There is no way for you to programatically foreground the app. If you think about it, allowing developers to do that could have significant consequences to user experience.

Bring App to foreground

Yes, you can technically use Xcode for jailbreak development (but you don't have to). If you want your app to be installed outside the normal sandbox, and in /Applications/, then you'd build with Xcode without code signing, fake code sign (or use self-signed certificate), and then copy/install the app to your device, using scp or something similar (maybe have a script for this).

You can google search on tools like "Theos", "Logos", or "iOSOpenDev", too. More here

Also, see this page for information about fake code signing with Xcode.

In terms of bringing an app to the foreground, there's at least a couple ways to handle that:

One would be to use Cydia to install the (free) utility open. With open, you can issue a command line call to open any app, by using its bundle ID (e.g. open com.mycompany.MyAppName). If you want to do this programatically, issue that command within a system() call:

 #import <stdlib.h>

 int returnCode = system("/usr/bin/open com.mycompany.MyAppName");

Another alternative is to see this answer by @WrightsCS. Make sure to read the comments, too, about where this goes.

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Update: in terms of putting your app into the background, you can kill your app completely with either exit(0) or [[UIApplication sharedApplication] terminateWithSuccess]. Or, see this answer for a solution to programmatically simulate a home button press, which will send the app to the background without killing it.

You won't be able to use NSTimer, because timers don't fire while your app is in the background. However, you can use GCD blocks to run your background work, and make the system() call with open to bring you back to the foreground.

See this answer, probably scrolling all the way to the bottom of his post

or look at this similar answer, which was actually posted at the bottom of the question

How to come Ios App to foreground from background

unfortunately bringing an app from background to foreground is not possible. You can however send a notification or a badge for the user to click and open the app. The user should have notifications enabled for this to work.

Happy Coding!

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