File Manager equivalent on iOS?

Question

I'm making a video decoder application on iOS using Xcode 4.2. On click of a button I need to choose an input file to decode from a list of files. Since there is no File Manager or File Browser on iOS, is there any way to go about this?

Answer 1

As others have pointed out, there is no iOS file manager. What there is the FileManager class. This class provides you the ability to:

• get read-only access to items in your app package
• get read/write access to your app's sandboxed container

You cannot access files elsewhere on the device, nor files belonging to other applications.

Some iOS applications (camera, pictures, contacts, etc) can be interacted with in a limited fashion by iOS API's that apple provides for that purpose. You can get more information about this in the apple developer docs online.

Thus, if your files are in your local app sandbox you can use FileManager to manually build a UI that allows users to see lists of the files there and pick one. They key being "you can build" on top of FileManager's functions for accessing the file tree.