iOS Why aren’t there apps that can start a web server to serve static websites?

[4004786]

I’m a web developer without much iOS experience, and I have a question for someone that does have some experience. There are libs out there such as:

https://github.com/swisspol/GCDWebServer

that appear to let you spin up a local web server on iOS. Are there technical limitations that would prevent this from serving up files from, say, iCloud Drive? Or is it just that Apple wouldn’t let an app into the app store?

If there was a way to serve up local files from iCloud Drive, then I think there could be some pretty cool web dev apps built.

I’m sure there’s something preventing this, either technical or because of app guidelines, so I’m mainly just wondering if anyone here knows why that is. Do you know?

Thanks for reading!

 

[firewood]

I’m a web developer without much iOS experience, and I have a question for someone that does have some experience. There are libs out there such as:

https://github.com/swisspol/GCDWebServer

that appear to let you spin up a local web server on iOS. Are there technical limitations that would prevent this from serving up files from, say, iCloud Drive? Or is it just that Apple wouldn’t let an app into the app store?

If there was a way to serve up local files from iCloud Drive, then I think there could be some pretty cool web dev apps built.

I’m sure there’s something preventing this, either technical or because of app guidelines, so I’m mainly just wondering if anyone here knows why that is. Do you know?

Thanks for reading!

It's easy to do if the app stays in the foreground. But there are lots of File and Document storage apps that do so already in the App store.

 

[kage207]

Check out Coda. Doing HTML static files isn't really that hard to do.

EDIT: Keep in mind you don't need a server to render HTML in a dev environment.