I had an opportunity to pitch a smartphone app idea to my professor on Software Engineering class and came up with an idea to use the Apple’s Game Center as a communication medium for my little utility app idea. The idea is very simple. All the internal mechanism of the app should be the same as any ordinary utility app. However, all communications and collaborations between different devices will be made possible through the use of the GameKit Framework, which is a set of programming library provided by Apple to communicate with its Game Center cloud service. The workflow should be kind of similar to any turn-based matching game like Letterpress, Monopoly, or any word game, but with customised set of rules (for example, everybody can take a turn).

The pros

• Allow different devices to connect and exchange information through the Game Center
• Can participate different matches simultaneously
• No server is needed
• Notification, notification, notification
• If the other participant does not have our app yet, Game Center will invite to load the app automatically

The cons

• Only 64 kilo bytes are allowed as a chuck of data (so limited)
• The maximum number of 16 participants based on the turn-based matchmaking limitation
• Still need to work out on how far we could go with the service

Conclusion

If what I’m thinking here were right, I think there is a huge potential here for the Game Center as a medium for app’s communications. It would be so beneficial if we could really make use of this service that Apple has provided for us…