Debugging An Undebuggable App
The sorts of things we do here, like modding TikTok to only show cat videos or fixing freezes in other peoples’ apps, all require the ability to take an app and poke at it to see how it works.
But it’s not uncommon for iOS apps to include additional protections to keep prying eyes away — like jailbreak detection or code obfuscation.
Though it looks like this app has a surprisingly fun combination of them. A lot more than I’d expect for a regular old Widget app.
It turns out this app does a few things more interesting than a regular old Widget app — but that’s for a future post!
Let’s start with getting the debugger attached, because that might help us with sorting out the other protections later.
I’m running this app on a jailbroken phone, which usually makes it pretty easy to attach a debugger to an app. Normally, we can ssh into the phone and then start debugserver attached to a given app:
That’s how it should work — but if we try to do the same thing with this widget app, we run into a problem launching debugserver:
