See the overall rationale in the readme in the parent folder.
Same as imUrlData but adding a usable iOS App side rather than just appearing as an extension and sending custom messages from the App.
We are not trying to share any significant logic between the two sides. One complicating factor is that MessagesViewController is a MSMessagesAppViewController.
If we wanted to have common UI would need it to be nested ViewControllers inside that.
However, to make it interesting, we do want the app to influence the behaviour of the message extension, so we allow it to set which moods are available. The values are stored in a simple plist file, managed by SharedData.swift and both app and extension are members of an AppGroup.
This mimics a common pattern - put the Settings features into the main app.
Note another strong reason to have the companion app installable is to support In-App Purchases as these are not officially supported in iMessage extensions.
| App with two buttons disabled | Messenger showing matching state |
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This was sparked by a 2024-10-04 tweet about how to enable the + button (for adding attachments), in MFMessageComposeViewController so thought I'd spent a little while extending this sample to try it.
The Send Plain Message from App button tests this out and the short answer is NO!
Whilst the canSendAttachments call returns true, that's only that you are able to attach known media to the message. There's nothing at all that lets you enable that button.
The feature has been missing since iOS10.
Even more annoying Apple prohibit you doing anything to obscure the disabled button:
Apple provide MFMessageComposeViewController so you can compose messages inside an app. This is documented as being mostly about sending text but you can also assign the message property which is an MSMessage. The documentation misleadingly says To display your iMessage app, create and assign an MSMessage object to this property. but there's no such automatic behaviour.
What does seem to happen, magically behind the scene, is that the iMessage delivered is typed for the iMessage Extension App bundled with your sending app. ie: you can only use this technique when there's an extension.
That makes absolute sense when you think about it - the app may be used to send custom messages, but custom messages can only be received in an extension.
Created using XCode 10.1 as a Single View App then added an iMessage App Extension second target.
Important Note When you create an iMessage app like imUrlData you have a .app target generated as part of the project. However, that's a very specialised host for the iMessage App Extension and can not be converted into a standard app.
The way to go is as shown in this sample - start with a normal app and add an iMessage App Extension to it.
If you look in the git history of this sample you will see how I made the mistake of starting with a plain copy of imUrlData and tried to modify its app into a real one. On realising, and researching, that this is impossible, I started over with a Single View App.