Icons of running application in iOS

Question

I'm learning iOS programming. I was wondering if there is any way to show the icons of all the running apps in the phone. I know how to get a list of apps that are running currently, but is it possible to access their icons?

If not, what is the best way to do this? Crawl the appstore for icons and store it in the app?

You're not trying to make a "task killer" are you? Is this for jailbroken phones? — jrturton, Jan 31 '12 at 06:53
It doesn't sound like something Apple would like you to do... it goes against their Sandbox policy http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Security/Conceptual/AppSandboxDesignGuide/AboutAppSandbox/AboutAppSandbox.html — Oded Regev, Jan 31 '12 at 07:34
@Magnus, my requirement is to show apps by memory usage. This is a research project. — Andy, Feb 05 '12 at 05:33

score 0 · Answer 1 · 2012-05-09T10:43:57.240

If you cannot do it directly through some API trickery, how about a sideways workaround? If you know the names of the apps that are running, you could build a process that grabs the app icons through the iTunes Store Search API (using NSData's initWithContentsOfURL: method (docs), or with NSURLConnection and its delegates).

It might be a bit convoluted, but is probably the most straightforward way of getting the icon of any app that might be running.

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:33

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I have tried to grab app icons using the API and I make it! Take an example of app yelp, the premise is you get the buddleid of this app, which you can refer to Finding list of installed apps on iphone

And https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?bundleId=com.yelp.yelpiphone

helps to get the information in the form of json. Use the value for key "artworkUrl60" to get the icon of yelp

edited May 23 '17 at 10:33

Community

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answered May 14 '14 at 15:46

Lihang Liu

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 31 '12 at 06:28

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As far as I know there is no API for getting the current running apps in iOS (but there is something like this for Android).

If you want to show only the currently running app icons, how will crawling appstore help?

answered Jan 31 '12 at 06:28

Srikar Appalaraju

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You can use a sysctl call to get the running processes. And then have a mapping somewhere in the cloud between crawled app icons and process names; sync that data with the device. Pretty convoluted way! – Andy Feb 05 '12 at 05:41

Icons of running application in iOS

3 Answers3