Is background tasks the solution for this problem?

Question

I need to develop an enterprise app that monitors the network traffic. Basically it detects if the user is in wi-fi or cellular data and save the amount of bytes was sent and received in a period of time. I saw an App at the AppStore that do exactly this job. Detecting wi-fi or cellular data is quite simple using the Reachability Sample provided by Apple. My problem is to keep monitoring the bytes sent and received while the app is in background.

As it is an enterprise App, I used UIBackgroundModes "voip" to avoid the app to be terminated. I also installed the setKeepAliveTimeout method and I'm able to see the logs each 10 minutes, BUT only for 10 seconds after the method runs. I mean, setKeepAliveTimeout brings my App to run a Timer for 10 seconds each 1o minutes.

I'm thinking wether or not a task in background is the best solution for my problem.

I'll appreciate any comments.

EDIT: Ok guys. Thats the perfect way to do it.

First of all you must read this: http://www.christian-fries.de/blog/files/tag-ios.html

I tried this and it works really fine. All we need to do is to create a second thread detached from the main one. This way we have a continuos threading running forever. You must see the GCD docs at Apple's website also.

Second thing you should consider for an enterprise App is to set it up as a voip App, this way iOS will put your App running even after a reboot. It's a special behavior iOS has to keep voip Apps running.

Thats it guys. I hope it can help you.

Answer 1

We dont have access to this data. There is no way to measure traffic.

The app you saw made an estimation (eg. 1mb/min) and after applicationWillEnterForeground. then you calc time x estimated-traffic and there we go.

Unfortunately there is no way to measure, so I did a traffic-reset in settings and then i streamed exactly 1 min music. after a few repetitions I had my results. The problem is, that this works only fine with static traffic-processes like audio or video.

hope could help endo

EDIT: look answer below!