Hey guys, is it possible to send and receive data between tvOS and my iPhone, without using iCloud?
I have an existing app that I want to extend to the tvOS as an Universal App.
But I want to send some data from my iPhone to the Apple TV. Which method do you suggest?
Thanks a lot guys!
Since tvOS is just iOS with some bits missing, you can use normal networking paradigms to create a "server" running on the appletv. For our digital signage app, we just listen on a socket that we broadcast on bonjour so that the companion app running on an ipad can find the server and connect. Once the normal tcp connection is made, packets can be sent over it like any other network connection. No icloud needed.
Hi Jerald,
for this to make it happen the prerequisite is to connect the iPad (or any iDevice) to appleTV with bluetooth? (I am not able to connect iPhone5
to appleTV with bluetooth)
Hey Jerald thanks for the reply.
Any great resource to start with, so I don't lose too much time focusing on the wrong stuff.
Thanks in advance 🙂
Bluetooth is not necessary, but a wifi connection (phone) and a wired or wifi connection (tvOS) is required.
My tvOS app gets JSON data from a server, and formats and displays it on the TV. Most of the data is text, which I just display. One item is a URL to an image, which I load and display as a UIImageView.
But one of the fields is a URL to a product support web page. Given the absence of UIWebView, however, I can't display the web page (without re-implementing UIWebView... ug). I was thinking about sending the URL to an iOS device so the user could display it there. But I can't justify writing an app for iOS just to re-implement SMS/email.
So I'd also be interested in any clever thoughts on how to transport a small text message to an iOS device without writing code for the iOS device. Nothing jumped out at me (are there any free SMS gateways that our apps could HTTP POST to?), but I'm a bit of a n00b.
I used the GCDAsyncSocket networking library but just about any networking library that works on iOS should work on tvOS. You could even just use the CoreFoundation calls for socket programming if you were so inclined. The point I was making is as far as networking is concerned, its just like iOS. However, as an other poster commented, some sort of network connection is required, whether wifi or wired.
