Extracting Data from an Old iOS App Broken by iOS 14.5

App Thinning removes unused slices on download, it doesn't change compiled code.

If you do not trust Apple, why are you wasting time writing apps for their platform?

Apple could publish a builder binary with which you could verify that your submitted code gets compiled+linked+thinned into the same thing you get from the App Store (minus the signature.)

They haven't — which is bad — but they could, and that would be a guarantee. Same as you get with reproducible binary packages in Debian.

Many people have voiced exactly this problem.

And I would agree it should be outrageous and intolerable.

I wonder if there might be some way for a developer to post their own hashes somewhere, but then there's no good way for an end user to use them to verify their phone.

You could post a web page that reports that Apple has not modified the contents of your app, or a site could do that for many apps, by downloading the Apple-repacked app and checking it, but you could only check the copy of the app that the site downloaded.

It would not prove that Apple didn't modify the individual copy of the app residing on anyones phone.

I don't know the details of ios userspace, but I extremely doubt it's possible for the browser or any other app to read some other apps files and uload them to a site to have them checked. So you couldn't make a 3rd party site that says "check my phone".

Maybe such a report could be made by reading the app out of an unencrypted backup?

Oh, this is too good.

I mean, since Apple controls the entire OS there is already no guarantee that the code that gets installed is the code that gets executed. In other words, you already had that problem. (Of having to trust Apple in the first place.)

On iOS, the security model has always been Apple signs the code, and no cryptographic protection from Apple modifying it.

On Android, the original security model was that the developer signs the code, preventing a distributor from modifying it (as long as the signature checks are sound).

Apple's system is worthy of complaining about, but you can only bring it up so often. Google taking Android backwards in this regard is worth making a fuss over; but Google is likely to just steamroll through.

Windows 10 telemetry and whatnot can all be turned off. It's still the desktop OS it always was, just with some extra crapola (Cortana) that iOS millennials expect. At least Windows isn't sending a hash of every file I open to their servers like Apple is...

It's more that a lot of people seem to have zero mental model about how the file system in their computer works (files, folders, paths, ...). Let alone their computer as a whole.

keychain persists, user defaults won't, if you store files in the documents directory it will persist if offloading the application. CoreData will NOT afaik, unless you choose to define where it persists. I'd also say that CoreData isn't exactly only meant for persisting data either - it can do that, but first and foremost it is an object graph.

more fun facts: user defaults has a limit to how big it can be. And I also think that your library would benefit from using actual types instead of Any, you can actually define this so long as the value is Codable, generics would make the library nicer to work with instead of requiring the dev to cast the type themselves. You basically just switch out Any for a generic and have the Generic conform to Codable. If targeting an iOS version that is 14+ I would just recommend using the AppStorage or SceneStorage property wrappers.

Essentially, yes. I subscribed to Setapp as soon as I realized they have several apps I already had individual subscriptions for (like Ulysses), and Setapp is cheaper. I’m a happy customer.

Yes, and for the value of the software it is well worth it! I had paid for several apps standalone, and I now get them through Setapp (including updates) and pay far less!

It's great!