Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rogerbinns 4790 days ago
I'm incredibly frustrated by the lack of command line dev tools for iOS. For example using adb with Android, I can stop a running app, clear all of its data and start it again. I can push and pull files and can dissect the internal state as a result.

I do find various unmaintained tools for iOS as they generally use undocumented and changing backends.

My current biggest need is to grab and put files in the app sandbox. There are several gui tools that can do it like i-funbox, but absolutely nothing that is automatable. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15980545/command-line-acc...
3 comments
LegNeato 4790 days ago
Check out http://www.libimobiledevice.org/ and https://github.com/ios-driver/libimobile-java
link
rogerbinns 4790 days ago
I already did a while back. I couldn't find any evidence that it supported access to the application sandbox which uses a slightly different protocol.
link
orta 4790 days ago
I have a library that does this for simulator apps in iOS: http://github.com/orta/chairs/ - but as you say, undocumented , unofficial & hacky
link
rogerbinns 4790 days ago
For various reasons I need this mostly for real devices which is even less documented, official and more hacky :-)
link
orta 4790 days ago
well, TBH, apps like iExplorer exist. If I can find out how that can access the device's filesystem I can probably do the same and support device & sim. I'll make a github issue.
link
rogerbinns 4790 days ago
Cool. iExplorer even has a Fuse module which would be perfect except it is extremely buggy. You have to use the gui to mount, and can only mount an application sandbox not one level up. If the app is uninstalled/reinstalled they lose the plot. (They never responded to my bug reports and inquiries. The iFunbox folks didn't either - seems to be a pattern with these kind of tools for Mac.)
link
seany 4790 days ago
You mean you don't want to drive the organizer and instruments via scripting bridge? :-p
link
rogerbinns 4790 days ago
I couldn't find the dictionary for the organizer. In any event the organizer only shows my apps, rather than all apps as ifunbox and similar tools do.

fruitstrap would also greatly help but it is no longer maintained (with several forks).

link