Using iOS Notifications, Cryptography and iCloud to build your own Chat App XII

I should start this article with a disclaimer, it based on iOS 13, Swift 5 and Xcode 11.x. If you reading this and those numbers look dated, be forewarned.

I should also warn you that notifications and iCloud code, involve Apple’s infrastructure which means you will need an Apple Developers account to use them.

Obviously this is part XI. It is an ongoing series in which I blogging the development of whatsapp type app using the above tech. To get the most of it you need to start at the beginning.

We just added a content extension, which I feel worked well. But I am uneasy about the secret, having a random 8 digit hexedecimal number isn’t too friendly. Lets change the interface so that you can input a secret when you create a user. While we’re at it lets introduce groups as well to make the whole thing more scalable.

Like to say it is a quick minor change, but it isn’t. We need to visit the cloud desktop in our browser and create a new field, group as a String. We need to add a little bit code to out cloud.swift file and we need to do considerable changes to our contentView.swift file.

So, lets get too it. Here is snapshot of the new schema taken from the icloud desktop.