AppExplorer

AppExplorer demos the use of some of Apple's private frameworks. The application is capable of retrieving all of the devices installed apps as well as their icons and can launch any of the applications.

Theory

Each application on iOS is a type of LSApplicationProxy. This class contains a number of defining properties associated with each applicaton. LSApplicationWorkspace manages these application proxies, controlling the launch of the application, installation, and deletion.

By using these class headers (as well as the classes they inherit from) I was able to reverse-engineer some private calls and launch applications based on their bundle identifier. These bundle identifiers could, in turn, be found by the application workspace.

In order to recieve the applications' icon images I used the original UIImage.h class header from UIKit. I created an UIImage extention for the important private methods from the original UIImage header which I want to call. The one I was primarily interested in was _applicationIconImageForBundleIdentifier:(id)arg1 format:(id)arg2;.

Implementation

I created two classes SystemApplicationManager and SystemApplication which aim to allow for easier use of interfacing with the underlying classes stated above. Adopting the principals of Swift, I wanted to make sure any data being passed was safely handled, since the private classes these are based on could change at any time.

Do it yourself!

Standard Install

This method is shown in the demo project.

1. Link the framework MobileCoreServices.framework.
2. Copy the Private Headers folder to your project.
3. Copy the SystemApplicationManager.swift and SystemApplication.swift classes to your project.
4. Get Swifty with it!

let installedApps = SystemApplicationManager.sharedManager.allInstalledApplications()

Thats about it. Now you can get a number of properties from each of the SystemApplication objects in the array.

Non-Framework Install

This method doesn't require any external frameworks or private headers to be imported.

1. Copy the EmbeddableSystemApplicationManager.swift and Invocator.m classes from the Embeddable folder as well as the SystemApplication.swift class to your project.
2. Add #import "Invocator.m" to your bridging header.
3. Secretly get data from installed applications!

let installedApps = EmbeddableSystemApplicationManager.sharedManager.allInstalledApplications()

You can test this by replacing occurances of SystemApplicationManager with EmbeddableSystemApplicationManager and unlinking the framework in the demo project.

* Note that EmbeddableSystemApplicationManager and SystemApplicationManager share the exact same functionality.