Chapter 5: Reverse Engineering an iOS Application (Developed Using Swift)

In the last chapter, we discussed how iOS applications, developed using the Objective C programming language, can be reverse engineered and disassembled to extract useful information from the binary.

Swift is now (at the time of writing – December 2021) the official language for iOS application development. The majority of the modern iOS applications are developed using Swift, as it provides some great benefits, such as better code readability. Swift generates a compiler error as you write code so that issues can be fixed right away, and it has better memory management, less code (in comparison with Objective C), support for dynamic libraries, and so on.

In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics:

• Understanding the difference between Objective C and Swift applications
• Reverse engineering a Swift application

Let's dive in!