Using the UIDocumentPickerViewController, is it possible to show a default service (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) on first open like in Slack?

Question

Normally, the behavior with UIDocumentPicker is that you present, then the user must use the "Locations" menu on the top right to switch between the services. Is it possible to display either "Dropbox" or "Google Drive" first by default? Almost as if we're "deeplinking" into the UIDocumentPicker service.

It seems like Slack App is able to do this and also the MyMail App but I wasn't able to find an API for it. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Instead of using a UIDocumentPickerViewController, try using a UIDocumentMenuViewController. Here is the relevant documentation.

UIDocumentMenuViewController *documentProviderMenu =
[[UIDocumentMenuViewController alloc] initWithDocumentTypes:[self UTIs]
                                                     inMode:UIDocumentPickerModeImport];

documentProviderMenu.delegate = self;
[self presentViewController:documentProviderMenu animated:YES completion:nil];

By default, this will display apps that include a Document Provider extension (such as Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, etc.). So if a user has Dropbox or Google Drive installed on their device, these options would show up automatically.

You can also add custom options to the menu by calling the addOptionWithTitle:image:order:handler: method.

Answer 2

Swift code example:

let documentProvider = UIDocumentMenuViewController(documentTypes: ["public.image", "public.audio", "public.movie", "public.text", "public.item", "public.content", "public.source-code"], in: .import) 
documentProvider.delegate = self

self.present(documentProvider, animated: true, completion: nil)

Answer 3

This isn't specifically about Google Drive but at a past job I needed to display Facebook when Apple SDK wasn't showing me Facebook. (The edge case here was the user's Facebook account wasn't in Settings.)

So I grabbed their icon and made a custom entry.

I suspect that you could do the same here. Grab the Google Drive icon and make that a custom Document. And when the user selects it, you hand them off to Google.

This is just a guess since I've not used UIDocumentPicker. And also, it is quite hackish.