CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#windows-phone-8.1
DatForis
DatForis

Reputation: 197

can my windows phone application auto start?

Is there a way for my application to auto-start after some time instead of a notification? Or am I constrained to just notifications?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2276

Answers (2)

JumpyStackOverflow
JumpyStackOverflow

Reputation: 720

For such features you should look into: Windows Embedded 8.1 Handheld instead of the consumer version Windows Phone 8.1.

Upvotes: 2

jalgames
jalgames

Reputation: 789

The difference between Android and Windows Phone (you mentioned Android in your comment) is that Android allows you to do pretty much everything while Windows Phone is a very restricted system. So, unfortunately, the answer is no. (There are ways to launch your app from other places than the app's tile, though. See the end of the answer)

Why am I saying unfortunately? Of course, Windows Phone is a nice and seek operating system that runs wonderful even on low-spec devices like the Lumia 520. But that doesn't mean developers shouldn't get the freedom to interact with the Operating System and do innovative tasks.

But there are reasons Microsoft chose not to allow Autostart (or at least, restrict the area an app can access, not the autostart in particular):

  • it may irritate customers. Even if you show a message box, many customers just dismiss it without reading it and they wouldn't understand why an app would appear without their interaction
  • each feature would make the operating system slower and bigger. I don't want to say that an autostart makes the phone unusable, but here's a question: Do you need to run a registry cleaner on you PC from time to time? Yes, you do need to do so You even need to reinstall a PC form time to time. You don't need to do that on a Windows Phone. It just works and will always work (OK, that's maybe a bit too optimistic, but you get it...)

I also don't think an autostart is particularly useful on a mobile. Because each app runs full screen, the system would boot up to your app instead of to the start screen. I don't think the user will always want your app (most of the time, he'll want to look at his start screen or launch another app), so it would just be annoying. On a PC, you can use the auto start for small programs that should run in the background (for example, I've got a progamm that provides Git with my SSH keys that automatically starts up each time).

But as I mentioned above, there are other ways to launch your app. Using url schemes can be surprisingly powerful as you can put a button on a web page that will directly launch your app. Other apps will also be able to launch your app. But as it is not directly what you wanted to know, I won't explain it in detail and instead provide you wiht a gread link to msdn: Auto-launching apps using file and URI associations for Windows Phone 8

Upvotes: 2

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