OpenUrl freezes app for over 10 seconds

Question

I\'m currently developing an App, that needs to open a browser to display a webpage. To do that i use the [UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL method with

Answer 1

Had the exact same symptoms that you described: worked fine on iOS6, but ~10 second hang on iOS7. Turns out to be a threading issue.

We were issuing the [UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL directly from the AppDelegate method applicationDidBecomeActive(). Moving this to a background thread instantly solved the problem:

- (void)applicationDidBecomeActive:(UIApplication *)application
{
    ...

    // hangs for 10 seconds
    // [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString: url]];

    // Fix: use threads!
    [NSThread detachNewThreadSelector:@selector(openbrowser_in_background:) toTarget:self withObject:url];

    ...
}

- (void)openbrowser_in_background:(NSString *)url
{
    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString: url]];
}