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It looks like the author is decompiling the Flash SWF for the Facebook game. Would there be an equivalent way to do this for games on an iPad/iPhone without rooting the device?

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Yes. Unpack the .ipa file (it's just a ZIP archive) and then use any ARM disassembler on the actual binary.

It'll be harder, but not impossible to do (as we've seen by the twitter app API secret leaking some time ago).

How does one get to the .ipa file?

it's in the iTunes directory on your computer

Wouldn't you need to decrypt, on a jailbroken device, it to get something useful out of the assembly? Or is that not needed for disassembling?

The binaries are not encrypted, they're just signed.

Is that a new thing? Last I checked, the executable was heavily encrypted in the code section..

The binaries are indeed encrypted, as evidenced by running "otool -l <binary>|grep cryptid". Why do you think otherwise?

Sorry was just wrong.

Isn't the Flash version using the same back end and API calls as the iOS version?

iOS version works offline, so I imagine everything is local to the device.

And yet the Facebook app stays in sync?

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