SmartFox SDK in iOS9 / Xcode7 and App Transport Security

[tewner]

Good morning, all!

Has anyone checked for issues with compiling and running the SmartFox SDK against iOS9 (in Xcode7 Beta)?

• Will the SDK be affected by Apple's new App Transport Security (forcing everything to use "best-practice" HTTPS)?
• Will BlueBox (which runs on HTTP) be affected by the App Transport Security?
• How about the requirement that the app "support" IPv6?

So far, I have things running on iOS9 with no changes; I have not checked BlueBox yet, which I doubt will work without an "NSExceptionDomains" entry, unless it uses a low-level socket API.

Specifically, I'm curious whether anyone else has researched this and found something I've missed.

Thank you,
-Mike

[Lapo]

Hi,
we haven't tested with iOS9 specifically but with the release of SFS2X (2.10) the BlueBox is already HTTPS enabled, meaning that if you turn on TLS encryption it will use HTTPS if sockets are not available.

Cheers

[Lapo]

Update:
sorry the above comment isn't really correct, and I need to amend it.

The BlueBox client only works via HTTP, so starting from iOS9 switching to a BlueBox connection will fail. We don't have immediate plans to support HTTPS as our solution currently only works for HTTP and still offers perfect security as it can wrap a TLS connection.

In other words our solution uses HTTP only as the external wrapper, allowing us to tunnel a perfectly secure socket connection via HTTP. It's too bad Apple decided no one can no longer use HTTP.

Possibile alternative/solutions:
The BlueBox is mainly used for clients that cannot use sockets or are behind a proxy/firewall. By running the main SmartFoxServer TCP listener on well known ports such as 80 and 443 you can still avoid 99% of the issues related with firewalls thus rendering the loss of the BlueBox much less significant.

Finally it's worth saying that mobile devices are rarely running behind a firewall, so this issue should has a smaller impact on mobile overall.

Hope this clarifies the situation.

[tewner]

Thank you, Lapo - I appreciate the update!