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I am designing an iOS app UI with a freelancer UI designer and was referring back an forth to an app that I like as an inspiration for my app design.

I asked my designer to design something similar to that app we are looking at, then my designer told me that the way to do this is by coding and not design and he claimed that he hacked the app and is looking at its code !

Is it really possible to simply jailbreak and app and look at its code ? If so then is it at risk that someone would simply copy the code and re skin the app and put it up on app store ?

rmaddy
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Ibrahim
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  • Personally I have never reverse engineered (As I have heard it called) but I have spoken to many who claimed to have done so, however when quizzed over this and asked to prove it 100% of the time they have failed to actually provide any evidence and it seems to be all talk. I would take what he is saying with a pinch of salt and ask him to prove it because I would suspect he is talking bull s**t. You can however look at the resources contained within the app, all the app is, is a zipped folder. Just change the folder from `.api` to `.zip` Note this doesn't mean you can see code. – Popeye Jun 02 '14 at 20:01
  • @user3697428 just search for "decompile iOS" here at stackoverflow. Some helpful links https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1976699/decompile-iphone-app-binary http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2661722/decompile-an-app-binary-to-get-back-to-source-code https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17919304/decompilation-possibilities-in-ios-and-how-to-prevent-them – Sam B Jun 02 '14 at 20:46
  • Here's more practical answer http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22372289/how-to-class-dump-appstore-app/22372888#22372888 You will never get the original code but you can easely get disassembly. You can't simply copy whole disassembly and re skin the app, you can only analyse it. This may take a while but in the end you can figure out how it was written. – creker Jun 02 '14 at 21:00
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    Reverse engineering is rarely used to figure out how the whole app works. Usually it's used for very specific parts of the app like malware exploits, rootkits, security components, network protocols and so on. Stuff that you can't just write yourself or you need to figure out exactly. To sum up, you can only analyse an app disassembly to figure out how it was written. You will never get the original code. It not possible to just disassemble and reskin the app - if it's a complex app it will take many hours and days of analysis and in case of UI it's really not worth it. – creker Jun 02 '14 at 21:06

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Code gets uploaded to the app store as a binary so there's never any source code up there to begin with. I guess its possible that your designer is reading the binary somehow but that would be pretty unlikely.

Edit: It turns out it is possible to load the app into gnu debugger and view assembly. Or to decrypt the app and use class-dump to get the headers. However the original implementation code is gone.

neatnick
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