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How to get IPA file from iOS simulator

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?

Solution

  • 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
    ~~~~~~