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iosprivatelauncherurl-scheme

How could Launcher get the list of installed apps of my iPhone?

Many people use the Launcher app. enter image description here

I'm curious about how Laucher be able to get the list of installed apps of my iPhone?

I have found some way to do similar thing, but all of them are not perfect.

1.use canOpenUrl:, this api requires a lot of url-schemes of apps.

2.search the plist file /private/var/mobile/Library/Caches/com.apple.mobile.installation.plist, which is not available in non-jailbreak iPhone. Also this plist file is not exist anymore in ios9.

3.search /Applications, which is not available in non-jailbreak iPhone.

Question is that, how can Launcher be able to search my iPhone and get the list of installed apps?

Solution

  • So I downloaded Launcher into iTunes and had a look at its info.plist. It turns out that it does what you first suggested, queries canOpenURL: a lot of times to work out what you have installed.

    Here is the contents of LSApplicationQuerySchemes from version 1.3.6:

    https://gist.github.com/liamnichols/53069b01da032498bd04

    All 4561 of them