How to find undocumented iPhone API calls?

Question

In the early days of iPhone development, applications often exit the AppStore to use undocumented API calls. I always asked myself how people learned about these methods and what they do. I know a little about Objective-C, and I know that you can send any messages to some object, or you can even check if the object will respond to the method by calling responsesToSelector. So it seems that using undocumented API calls is not a problem, but I have no idea how to find them.

By the way, I do not want to use the undocumented features of APi. I just want to know how to do this. It may be useful when working with third-party structures. Or maybe someday people will use the frameworks I created.

Answer 1

Check out the Dump class . This will go through the framework and basically create the headers of each method, etc. that they contain. Very useful for reverse engineering infrastructures.

You can also try using the utility stringsfrom the command line. The utility stringswill output all raw strings contained in the compiled binary, which can be useful when searching for method names, etc.

Using it stringswill be a little more complicated / tedious, as it can also print a lot of garbage as well as useful material, so you need to drag it through to find interesting material.

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