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General Question about Reverse Engineering


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5 replies to this topic

#1
Yords1

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So I need to make a copy of an app and tweak it but I would need to fully decompile it to get the source code which is impossible on IOS. If I instead reverse engineered the app would I be able to retrieve its assets and then use those to make my version of it? Or are the assets unretrievable?



#2
Sacmunraga

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@Yords1, Hello. I think what you're trying to say is that you want to tweak an app for your liking? You are correct, there is no way that you can retrieve source code for an app, but you can look at a decrypted executable, study certain functions, and then proceed with tweaking of "hooking" those functions to produce wanted results. You will need a decrypted version of the iOS app to study the function with a disassembler such as Hopper or IDA (99% of all .ipa on AppCake are decrypted). Then after finding the certain function you will need to replace the code with objective c code of your own.

 

Hope this helps.



#3
Yords1

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@Yords1, Hello. I think what you're trying to say is that you want to tweak an app for your liking? You are correct, there is no way that you can retrieve source code for an app, but you can look at a decrypted executable, study certain functions, and then proceed with tweaking of "hooking" those functions to produce wanted results. You will need a decrypted version of the iOS app to study the function with a disassembler such as Hopper or IDA (99% of all .ipa on AppCake are decrypted). Then after finding the certain function you will need to replace the code with objective c code of your own.

 

Hope this helps.

 


@Sacmunraga 

 

Sorry, my post was a little confusing. I have no intention of tweaking the application itself. My question is, can I retrieve the assets of the application such as textures and sound files so that I can completely remake the application in a way that I am much more familiar with rather than writing my own obj c code?



#4
Sacmunraga

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@Yords1, sound file yes. They are usually found in the .ipa itself (change the extension from .ipa to .zip and unzip the file). Next look through the files, and you'll see xxx.mp3 or some other sound files. What other assets do you need to extract? 



#5
Yords1

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Image files, PNG JPEG SVG



#6
Sacmunraga

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@Yords1 yes, those can be extracted from the .ipa file by unzipping it.