Swift was introduced a couple of years ago at Apple’s 2014 WWDC. Over the years I analyzed iOS to measure how many built-in applications were using Swift. iOS 9 released in 2015 included a single application written with Swift: Calculator. Since then this number has grown with each iOS release: iOS 10.1, iOS 11.1, iOS 12.0 and finally iOS 13.1.
iOS 14 is now available so let’s check how this number evolved since iOS 13. Apple announced SwiftUI during WWDC 2019, a year ago. In this article I will also try to measure which built-in apps are using this new UI framework.
Assiduous readers of this blog might have noticed a significant drop in the number of articles last year. Couldn’t I find any interesting subject? Was I getting lazy? Hell no!
Today I am pleased to release Clatters for iOS and iPadOS. Clatters is an app to easily monitor in one place your brand, product or any other keyword on your favorite social networks - Reddit, HackerNews and even comments on the iOS App Store.
Swift was introduced at Apple’s 2014 WWDC and it is interesting to measure Apple’s own use of Swift in iOS over the years. iOS 9 released in 2015 included a single application written with Swift: Calculator. Since then the number of applications using Swift in iOS has grown each year with iOS 10.1, iOS 11.1 and iOS 12.0.
Now that iOS 13.1 is available, let’s measure how many applications are using Swift this year.
Using a VPN is an obvious solution when you are connected to internet on an untrusted network. Instead of paying a subscription to a VPN service, I decided to create my own VPN server. It turns out that this is much simpler than I expected.
In this article, I briefly explain what is a VPN and its advantages. I then explain how I built my own VPN server.
Lately, many people have wondered why some iOS apps were so huge. I asked myself this question and analyzed the Facebook application for iOS v. 66.0 in 2016 and v. 87.0 in 2017.
In this article, I dissect the Nest app (5.30.5) for iOS released on 29.11.2018. There has been quite some speculations about this app in a thread started by John Gruber on Twitter:
This post will answer some simple questions about this specific app:
Which technologies are used? Why is the app so big? Would it be possible to reduce the app size?
libMobileGestalt is a private library in iOS that describes the capabilities of the device: system version, build version, device type, device features, status of the airplane mode, …
Apple obfuscates this information which makes it hard to know the capabilities of the device. In January 2017, I presented a method for Deobfuscating libMobileGestalt keys. At that time there were 673 known obfuscated keys and I managed to recover 564 out of the 673 keys (83%).
Since this previous article, Apple has released 2 major iOS versions, and new obfuscated keys have been added. In this post I quickly recap what is libMobileGestalt and provide the updated list of recovered keys.
A QuickLook plugin on macOS 10.14 has several constraints to satisfy. If one of the limits is exceeded, the plugin will immediately be killed and no preview will be visible. Having such restrictions makes sense but they appear to be undocumented. This article addresses the lack of information about these constraints.
In a previous article, I reverse-engineered the .car file format used to store the compiled assets of an Asset Catalog. I also demonstrated how to create a tool to manually parse such files. While this tool can extract a lot of information, it is cumbersome to use if you want to quickly see all the assets contained in a car file.
An Asset Catalog is an important piece of any iOS, tvOS, watchOS and macOS application. It lets you organize and manage the different assets used by an app, such as images, sprites, textures, ARKit resources, colors and data.
Two years ago I measured Apple’s use of Swift in iOS 10.1 and last year I counted how many applications were using Swift in iOS 11.1.
This year I’m analyzing iOS 12, released by Apple this month.