Michal Ždanský iOS 8 brought a large number of functions for developers, thanks to which their applications can much better connect with the system and with other applications. One of the interesting novelties was interactive notifications, which allow you to perform actions without having to open the application. Thanks to this, for example, you can receive invitations in the calendar or mark tasks as completed from the lock screen, the notification center or from banner notifications.
One of the most interesting interactions, however, belongs to the Messages app, which allows you to quickly reply to SMS and iMessage without having to open the app, similar to how Cydia's BiteSMS tweak for jailbroken devices made it possible. We were looking forward to seeing this feature reach third-party apps as well, so we'll be able to quickly reply to messages on Skype, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. While some of these apps have already introduced interactive notifications, we haven't seen the ability to respond quickly. At best, the notification moved us to an app with a scripted conversation. But the developers are not to blame.
As it turns out, the quick reply feature is not available to developers. They can only use the action buttons, the quick reply is exclusive exclusively to the Messages application. This is surprising because, for example, OS X allows quick replies in notifications for third-party applications since version 10.9. However, all is not lost. It is possible that the relevant API will appear in one of the future updates, be it version 8.2 or even 9.0 next year. It is not clear why Apple did not offer this function to third parties, it is possible that it simply did not make it.
Apple has set very high goals for iOS 8, for which it effectively had around six months of development itself. After all, high ambitions in a very short time showed up on iOS 8 – the system is still full of bugs and probably even the 8.1 update, which is currently in beta, will not fix all of them. So we can only hope that we will see interactive notifications in the form of a quick response for third parties at least in the future.
I don't know what was the reason for this restriction, but it is a fact that iOS is developed by a relatively limited number of developers, and iOS 8 is, in terms of new functions and APIs, the biggest release since iPhone OS 2.0. So it's really possible that they just didn't make it.
And in this case too, it is necessary to think carefully about the safety of such a solution.