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Comment by emehrkay | Hacker News Reader

How easy would it be for apple to allow apps to register themselves with the ability to open certain files/handle certain situations and then present that in the system menu for those who want to tinker with that?

    default web browser    >
    default music          >
    etc.

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There is a difference between how easy it is and if Apple wants to allow it. The percentage of people who want to do this on a widely adopted consumer platform like iOS is small. I doubt Apple will ever allow this, it wouldn't significantly increase sales vs. support complexity/platform simplicity. Considering Apple is extracting the majority of the dollars from the smartphone market already I doubt they're too worried about losing the tweakers to Android.

That already exists:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/FileMa...

That's not what he meant. All mailto: links will open in the mail app. All http:// links will open in Safari. You want to take a picture from your twitter app? You want to share to twitter from the camera app? You have to use Apple's implementation, you can't push it through your favorite twitter app.

But it's sort of what you meant. I see "Open in Dropbox" and "Open in Camera+" quite frequently. Here's more on how that works: http://www.iphonejd.com/iphone_jd/2012/01/tip-missing-apps-i...

The URL style technique is supported as well, you can send data to another app by using it's URL scheme.

It's not a perfect implementation (you can't change the defaults like mail://), but I believe that's intentional.

Looks like this is a run-time version of what I posted. Thanks

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