How to relaunch an app like facebook-ios-sdk does?

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Question:

I am actively looking in the source code on Github's facebook-ios-sdk project myself but I was wondering if anyone already knows how to relaunch an app that sent an iPhone user to Safari, such that the user can come back after some work has been finished?

Example:

When using facebook to login, the original app is relaunched after the facebook login page has authenticated the user.

Motivation:

I would like to be able to do the same for youtube videos without having to completely lose the user. I don't want to use the standard webview approach because I don't want to provide extra space to first let the video load for the user and then have the user click the play button. I want to skip the play button and its associated click entirely! Instead I want the user to be able to click on just an everyday regular iPhone button and be shown the video with the navigation for coming back to the app via relaunch.

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Damien On

You need your app to register a "custom URL scheme". Then get the callback in the remote web service to return a URL with that scheme. iOS will then launch your application.

  • More (somewhat old) info available here.
  • A list of common custom URL schems on iOS can be found here.

Generally, as part of the OAuth login process, you supply a callback URL as one of the paramaters. What this does, is tell the remote server (YouTube), that on successful authentication, redirect the user to the supplied URL. If YouTube supports this (does it support OAuth?) then on successful user login within safari, youtube will tell users safari to redirect to the supplied url. If this url is a "custom URL scheme" it will cause your app to relaunch and you can handle the situation from there.