Developing Enterprise iOS Applications

Chapter 8. Long Term Maintenance of iOS Enterprise Applications

So, you’ve got an app in the store, people are starting to download and use it, and since you read this book from end to end, it went without a hitch and you’re a hero at your company. Alas, your job has just begun. Now you have to support that sucker!

Of course, this is true of any software that has to actually be put in the hands of end users. Wouldn’t life be so much easier without them? But, since you have them, you’re going to need to deal with them in the long term. This presents one particular challenge for enterprise developers, and it’s what this chapter is all about.

If your application connects to some resource in the cloud that’s under your control, you can close this book and crack open a beverage of your choice. But if it connects to a backend server that isn’t under your control, and which may exist at multiple version levels at the same time, read on.

A classic example of the first scenario is Salesforce. Individual customers don’t install the Salesforce server—they use the common one in the cloud, and it is always at a given API level and server version. If Salesforce wants to release a new iPhone app, all they have to do is make sure that it lines up with one of the current versions of the API living on their servers, and they’re golden.

But what about a scenario where your application is going to have to connect to multiple different versions of the server? In the case of the app I developed, our customers ...