How to ensure that my app never comes up as the default for "Open In..."

Question

My iPhone app registers itself as an "Alternate" handler for PDF files in CFBundleDocumentTypes, and recently I've started to get complaints from users about the fact that it has displaced iBooks as the default "Open In..." app for PDFs; it seems that iBooks only registers itself as an "Alternate" handler for PDFs too, and that the system is defaulting to my app instead of to iBooks.

Is there any way I can tell iOS that under no circumstances should it make my app the default "Open In..." if there's any other app on the system that can handle this file type?

Answer 1

As best as I can tell, when an app displays the UIDocumentInteractionController and the "open in" menu, the apps seem to appear in a "the most-recently-used shows first" order.

I ran an app that generates PDF files and then chose to export the PDF from the app. The list of apps appeared. I chose the 2nd app. I repeated the process. This time, the apps appeared in a different order. The one I chose before was now the first.

There doesn't seem to be much of a specific order for the rest of the listed apps. It could be based on the order the apps were installed.

In other words, there is nothing your app can do. iOS displays the apps in whatever order it sees fit. If the user wants iBooks to be first, then they should choose iBooks. It will be the default the next time.

BTW - Why are users complaining? iBooks is no more special for opening PDF files than any other app.