Is it possible to embed one iPhone app into another?

Is it possible to incorporate one iPhone app in开发者_运维百科to another in order to redistribute it? We're going to publish few apps owned by other developers and need to create some pre-rolls with our branding and some other similar features. The original developer could build the app for us, but won't provide us with a source code.

Sorry if the question sounds stupid, we haven't very big experience in the field, just need to clarify some things

Thank you!

No you can't. You are only allowed to execute your own app, you can't embed an other app in your bundle.

It is not possible to embed an app into another app, or better, you could do that, but Apple would reject it and anyway you would not be able to launch it on a non jailbroken device.

More to the point of your specific case, if you have only the binaries you could try and modify the resource files (i.e., .nib and .strings files) to modify the UI to some extent. Of course, you would then need to regenerate the signature for the app (and hope that everything works ok).

It's just a thought, but maybe you could include the other developers apps as static libraries. The advantages would be that the other devs wouldn't have to surrender their sources, you wouldn't face any code signing and bundle id related issues and including static libraries is perfectly safe.

The only disadvantage would be that the devs would still need to deliver the content seperately and they need to learn how to build a static library. An entry point for each app / each library to call it would also be needed, maybe even a small interface to allow the container app to learn about the individual apps status, to cancel them etc.

As I said, this is just an idea, there may be issues with that approach that I do fail to see right now. But maybe others can comment on this...

You might want to check out this link to learn a bit about building static objective c libraries.

Check apples Custom URL scheme, it might find useful for you. Just help=> http://iosdevelopertips.com/cocoa/launching-your-own-application-via-a-custom-url-scheme.html