External Actions: Choosy for iOS

One of the mildly frustrating things about iOS programming is that none of the various URL scheme handling schemes have managed to get enough traction to be all that widely useful. But here’s a new one that’s certainly the best put together we’ve seen yet, and we’d strongly encourage everyone to get on board with:

Choosy

People will love your app even more if it helps them use their other favorite apps. We’re essentially solving the iOS’ lack of default app selection mechanism.

Once Choosy is widely implemented, end users will be able to traverse the iOS ecosystem using just the apps they love, be they built-in ones or not…

Thanks to UIApplication’s canOpenURL method and iOS forcing unique url schemes. Basically, we store a list of URL schemes for each app on the server, and categorize apps. Choosy downloads that info as needed.

Choosy caches network data, so the traffic footprint is small. It also instantly knows when a new app from same category is installed, or the default app is deleted, and lets user re-select the default app. Choosy is non-intrusive – if there’s no connection and the default app hasn’t been selected yet, it just opens the default iOS app…

Looks like a big whack of user-pleasing functionality for no particularly large effort. Check it out on github today!