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iosxcodewhite-labelling

Best way to Whitelabel an existing iOS App


I started working at a company which developed an App for mobile payment. There is a "Terminal"-App, which receives payments of customers and then there's the "Wallet"-App, which users can download and use to pay (at those terminals).

The project consists out of 2 targets - one for the Wallet and one for the Terminal. The App is used only in 2 Countries. It's all quite sophisticated and has a huge code base.

Now I need to whitelabel the whole product for a client, who wants to use our App (both targets) with his own branding (and maybe some additional features or without some specific features) and I'm not sure what the best way would be to achieve that.

Currently I see 3 options:

  • Duplicate whole project

To copy the whole project to a new folder and make my changes in that new folder would probably be the most "dirty" approach. At some point, my first code base could differ from the duplicated one too much. Additionally, if any security-related issues would come up, I would have to fix it in both projects.

  • Create another 2 targets

I was actually thinking that this would be the best way to go. Creating a new target for the Wallet and the Terminal and then checking the current target in the source code to decide which features should be enabled or disabled sounded pretty good to me at the beginning. But then I created the new target and noticed that I will have to set that checkmark on EVERY single class for that new target. Besides that, I'm not sure any more if that's really the best way to go.

  • Use If-conditions

The third option would be to wrap every function, that will be available in only one of the apps, with an if loop. I see this as the "cheapest" option because it's easy to set up and I can still maintain my code base pretty well.

Is there any other option I have? Which way would yo go?

The most significant difference between the base App and the whitelabeled one will be its language. The whitelabeled version will be right to left, but iOS does a pretty good job on that without needing me to do all the mirroring.


Solution

  • You definitely want the extra targets. Having a new target means it's easy to use a separate bundle identifier, signing settings and more. It might seem like a pain to have to tick a bunch of boxes to add your files to the new target (perhaps quicker to use the target's Build Phase|Compile Sources list in Xcode) but it's worth it to create a real separation between the apps.

    Instead of using a bunch of source code checks to determine which white label app you're in, consider making your app more data-driven. A plist file could be used to determine which capabilities your app has, and a different plist file can be used for each target.

    For example, it might contain a top-level dictionary called features, with true/false values for a bunch of feature names. You have a FeatureManager that reads the file and is the single source of truth for all app components that want to know if something should be available or not.