Fetching Small Amounts of Content Opportunistically
Apps that need to check for new content periodically can ask the system to wake them up so that they can initiate a fetch operation for that content. To support this mode, enable the Background fetch option from the Background modes section of the Capabilities tab in your Xcode project. (You can also enable this support by including the UIBackgroundModes key with the fetch value in your app’s Info.plist file.) Enabling this mode is not a guarantee that the system will give your app any time to perform background fetches. The system must balance your app’s need to fetch content with the needs of other apps and the system itself. After assessing that information, the system gives time to apps when there are good opportunities to do so.
When a good opportunity arises, the system wakes or launches your app into the background and calls the app delegate’s application:performFetchWithCompletionHandler: method. Use that method to check for new content and initiate a download operation if content is available. As soon as you finish downloading the new content, you must execute the provided completion handler block, passing a result that indicates whether content was available. Executing this block tells the system that it can move your app back to the suspended state and evaluate its power usage. Apps that download small amounts of content quickly, and accurately reflect when they had content available to download, are more likely to receive execution time in the future than apps that take a long time to download their content or that claim content was available but then do not download anything.
When downloading any content, it is recommended that you use the NSURLSession class to initiate and manage your downloads. For information about how to use this class to manage upload and download tasks, see URL Session Programming Guide.
Using Push Notifications to Initiate a Download
If your server sends push notifications to a user’s device when new content is available for your app, you can ask the system to run your app in the background so that it can begin downloading the new content right away. The intent of this background mode is to minimize the amount of time that elapses between when a user sees a push notification and when your app is able to able to display the associated content. Apps are typically woken up at roughly the same time that the user sees the notification but that still gives you more time than you might have otherwise.
To support this background mode, enable the Remote notifications option from the Background modes section of the Capabilities tab in your Xcode project. (You can also enable this support by including the UIBackgroundModes key with the remote-notification value in your app’s Info.plist file.)
For a push notification to trigger a download operation, the notification’s payload must include the content-available key with its value set to 1. When that key is present, the system wakes the app in the background (or launches it into the background) and calls the app delegate’s application:didReceiveRemoteNotification:fetchCompletionHandler: method. Your implementation of that method should download the relevant content and integrate it into your app.
When downloading any content, it is recommended that you use the NSURLSession class to initiate and manage your downloads. For information about how to use this class to manage upload and download tasks, see URL Session Programming Guide.
Downloading Newsstand Content in the Background
A Newsstand app that downloads new magazine or newspaper issues can register to perform those downloads in the background. You enable support for newsstand downloads from the Background modes section of the Capabilities tab in your Xcode project. (You can also enable this support by including the UIBackgroundModes key with the newsstand-content value in your app’s Info.plist file.) When this key is present, the system launches your app, if it is not already running, so that it can initiate the downloading of the new issue.
When you use the Newsstand Kit framework to initiate a download, the system handles the download process for your app. The system continues to download the file even if your app is suspended or terminated. When the download operation is complete, the system transfers the file to your app sandbox and notifies your app. If the app is not running, this notification wakes it up and gives it a chance to process the newly downloaded file. If there are errors during the download process, your app is similarly woken up to handle them.
For information about how to download content using the Newsstand Kit framework, see Newsstand Kit Framework Reference.