versioning - Detecting iPhone app version update?

Question

I'd like to determine when new versions of my app are available on the Appstore and display some form of notification to the user when this happens - perhaps a UIAlertView or similar - and wondered whether anybody knew of any pre-designed frameworks for doing this? I found the StoreKit provided by iPhone SDK but it seems to only return application names, not version numbers, so is of no use to me.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I don't think that there is a prefabricated framework for that kind of issue. At least I couldn't find one when i was dealing with that topic.

What I did was fairly easy (provided that you have access to any kind of webserver where you're able to upload files)

I simply created a text file with two things in it.

1) the version number of the most up to date version available 2) a text that is being displayed to the user (in case his version is out of date)

on startup (actually I do it on every 3th startup and not more than once per day) i download the txt file, read the first line, extract the version, compare it to the current version of the app that is running on the users divice. if the version is out of date i then read the second line out of the text file and display it in an UIAlertView.

I hope I could help
*sam