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macosios-simulatorwiresharktrafficcharles-proxy

Get info about iOS Simulator traffic

When using a mobile Android Wi-Fi hot spot on macOS Catalina and MenuMeters utility to see total mobile traffic I noticed that every time I launch iOS Simulator (tested on iPhone Pro Max and iPhone SE 2nd generation both with iOS 13.5) it starts downloading huge amounts of data (approx. 450-800 MB) on every launch, so it gets rather expensive. I know that's Simulator because when I quit it traffic stops.

So I'd like to find out what and why Simulator may download maybe to try to block/work around this expensive operations.

I tried to use Charles and Proxyman to detect addresses Simulator could connect to - but with no avail, I cannot see this hundreds of megabytes there. Another option was Wireshark, but I do not know how I could use it to get what I want (as I imagine it should be some addresses from where Simulator could download data).

Could you please give me some advices how to get needed info with these applications or in some other way.

Edit

Thanks to accepted answer and Little Snitch I was able to catch and block "evil" connection

Little Snitch

Solution

  • If it's not appearing at all in Charles or Proxyman then it's probably not being sent over HTTP. Wireshark will show the raw TCP & UDP connections, but it's very complicated if you're not familiar with it, and there'll be a lot of info there.

    One good option for this is Little Snitch. It does exactly what you want, and can show you exactly who every app is connecting to and how much traffic is sent. It normally costs $30, but they let you try it out for free, and a quick check should be all you need.