Popover inside a popover

Question

I made a very big mistake, in some instances there will be two popovers on the screen at once. What is the probability of getting my app rejected?

Unmitigated

Answer 1

From the iOS Human Interface Guidelines:

Ensure that only one popover is visible onscreen at a time. You should not display more than one popover (or custom view designed to look and behave like a popover) at the same time. In particular, you should avoid displaying a cascade or hierarchy of popovers simultaneously, in which one popover emerges from another.

Apple will reject any application that displays two distinct UIPopoverControllers onscreen at once (many people I know have run into this). At first, they let a few applications on the store that did cascading popovers (a popover within a popover), but this language seems to have tightened up, so I'd expect them to not allow this now.

Neldanelia

thanks brad . . you said that popover within popover was allowed earlier . . can you tell me any app with this problem which was authorized by Apple review team ? – Unmitigated

@Unmitigated - None that I can remember right now. I checked all of the applications I have that I thought might contain something like this, and none do. If they did this, they have removed it since then. – Neldanelia

I will remove the popover within popover and send to app review. Thanks a lot :) – Unmitigated

Answer 2

Generally, a popover will be dismissed if you tap outside of it, so unless you are using a popover inside of a popover, the situation you describe is impossible. If you are nesting popovers, I suspect that you are correct, it may get your app rejected.

Whether

Actually, it's surprisingly easy to have multiple popovers onscreen. If you have a button that displays a popover and another that displays another popover, tapping on the second button will not dismiss the first popover. You have to manually manage these cases yourself (or at least you did as of iPhone OS 3.2). – Neldanelia

Oh, I though of that case, but assumed that tapping on the other button would automatically dismiss the first one. – Whether

Yes, this can be a real headache, especially if you're dealing with a split view and action sheets that appear like popovers. For an example of how I ended up handling this, you could look at the code to my Molecules application: sunsetlakesoftware.com/molecules . Other people use singletons or some other managing structure, which might be simpler than looking after each popover individually like I do. – Neldanelia