'Safari view controller' will bring persistent logins to web view in iPhone and iPad apps

If you've clicked a link in an app in the past, you've no doubt noticed that the integrated web view won't store login information for a site that you may be browsing. A proposed solution to this is what is called "Safari view controller," something our own Rene Ritchie wrote about late last year, and it looks like it's eventually going to make its way to iOS. Ricky Mondello, a Safari engineer at Apple, made the announcement on Twitter:

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The issue up until now has been that web view hasn't been allowed to store cookies for security reasons, so logins can't persist. The solution that Safari view controller brings to the table is to essentially pull the information from Safari. Here's the breakdown from Bryan Irace that we previously covered:

It'd be wonderful if Apple provided a "Safari view controller" that developers could present directly from within their applications. This controller would run out of process and work almost exactly like MFMailComposeViewController and MFMessageComposeViewController already do for composing emails and text messages respectively. The app would provide the controller with a URL (and optionally, a tint color), but otherwise what the user does in it would remain secure and isolated from any third-party code, yet fully integrated with Safari.app and Safari controllers presented by other applications.

While Mondello announced that he will show the feature off during a developer session at WWDC, it's unclear if this will be coming in iOS 9 or at some later point.

Sources: Ricky Mondello (Twitter), Bryan Irace

Dan Thorp-Lancaster