Is there any delegate that fires when I run the iphone application for the first time?

Question

I need to track the download of a certain iphone application. I tried a lot and found out that we could track it from the AppStore. But i need to track that from my application itself. So please help me to identify the method that fires when the application starts for the first time. Thanks.

Answer 1

There's no specific method that fires only on the 1st application launch. You can set a flag in user defaults on application start - so if the flag is not present then that will mean that application launched for the 1st time:

- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication *)application { 
    if (![[NSUserDefaults standardDefaults] boolForKey:@"AlreadyLaunched"]){
        // First launch logic

        [[NSUserDefaults standardDefaults] setBool:YES forKey:@"AlreadyLaunched"];
        [[NSUserDefaults standardDefaults] synchronize];
    }
    ...
}

Answer 2

But i need to track that from my application itself.

No.

But if you really want to do this you could use something like this:

BOOL hasUsedSpyWareFunctions = [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] boolForKey:@"SpyWareKey"];
if (!hasUsedSpyWareFunctions) {
    [self spyOnUser];
    [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] setBool:YES forKey:@"SpyWareKey"];
}

if you are a Pro in spying you only set the key to YES if the method returned successfully (ie a network connection could be established)

Answer 3

There's no such an event, at least not one that I know of. But what you want can be trivially done using NSUserDefaults . Simply check for some boolean flag and if it's not there, it's a first run and you can set the flag:

NSString *const AlreadyRunKey = @"already-run";
NSUserDefaults *prefs = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];
if (![prefs boolForKey:AlreadyRunKey]) {
    [prefs setBool:YES forKey:AlreadyRunKey];
    [prefs synchronize];
    // do whatever else you want
}