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I have developed two simple apps with Xamarin.Forms and Ionic and need to perform a reverse engineering on the created APK and IPA files for Android and iOS. I need to do this for my study. It's easy to get the APK file from an Android emulator, but what's the best way to get the IPA file from an iOS simulator.

I already tried to use Cydia, but without success till now. I saw in Xcode that there is an option to export the IPA if you have an Apple Developer account. Whats the best way to get the two IPA files? And if I get them, are they encypted?

Pinzi
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  • Why don't you just look in the output directory? You don't need IPA for that. In the output directory you will find *.app directory which will contain everything that would be in IPA. – creker Mar 31 '18 at 15:46

1 Answers1

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There is no .ipa of your app installed within the Simulator, there is just an .app

From your home directory, cd into:

~/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices

From there will be a listing of unique IDs of each simulator device type that you have run. You will need to do some searching, either by date/time or by app name, i.e. 

find . -name "SomeXamarinApp*"

You can cd into the dir that you found and you will have the location of the .app:

tree

└── Forms_Tester_LibBased.iOS.app
    ├── Forms_Tester_LibBased.dll
    ├── Forms_Tester_LibBased.iOS
    ├── Forms_Tester_LibBased.iOS.exe
    ├── Forms_Tester_LibBased.iOS.pdb
    ├── Forms_Tester_LibBased.pdb
    ├── Info.plist
    ├── LINKEDIN.png
    ├── LaunchScreen.storyboardc
    │   ├── 01J-lp-oVM-view-Ze5-6b-2t3.nib
    │   ├── Info.plist
    │   └── UIViewController-01J-lp-oVM.nib
    ├── Mono.Security.dll
    ├── Mono.Security.pdb
    ~~~~~~
SushiHangover
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  • Thank you, thats a very useful information for me. The .app can be found in the file system of the simulator or directly on my Mac Book? – Pinzi Mar 31 '18 at 16:12
  • @Pinzi The file system of the *simulator* **is** your macOS file system (unlike the Android **emulator**), the files are directly on your macOS drive as "normal files". – SushiHangover Mar 31 '18 at 16:13
  • Ok, I didn't know/consider that. Thank you very much. I'll try it out. – Pinzi Mar 31 '18 at 16:19
  • @Pinzi, and also iOS simulator is just a macOS application that runs your "iOS" apps that also just regular x86-64 macOS applications. iOS simulator is not an iOS in any way except it looks similar to it and has all libraries similar to that of iOS. If you want to do any type of research for iOS, the simulator is not the way to do it. – creker Mar 31 '18 at 16:25
  • @SushiHangover: Thank you very much, you saved my day!! It is working exactly as described by you. – Pinzi Mar 31 '18 at 16:26
  • @creker: the structure of the app is enough for me. I doesn't matter for the scope of my work if it is running on iOS or not – Pinzi Mar 31 '18 at 16:27