Find the Name of Applications on iOS for Opening via SSH

Filed Under Apple, Geek, Hacks and Mods on 2013-07-05, 21:35

This is probably a post that will only be useful to a handful of people. Say you want to launch applications on an iPhone without actually touching the iPhone? Why? I don’t care, you probably have your reasons. For me it’s because I’m putting my old iPhone 4 in a dock permanently and want to be able to display different things without getting up and going over to it. Also I want to script things to open at different times for different reasons.

This requires a jailbroken iPhone obviously, and assume you’ve already installed OpenSSH (you have changed your root password, right?).

You want to download the “open” application from Cydia. Then all you’ll need to do is ssh into your iPhone and use “open [application bundle name]”. Sounds easy, right? The tricky part is knowing each application’s bundle name. some are easy to guess, like com.apple.calculator, whereas others are harder like com.Halfbrick.Fruit for Fruit Ninja.

Now you could download iFile from Cydia and go through every single folder in your /User/Applications directory and open the iTunesMetadata.plist and locate the “softwareVersionBundleId”. That works, but it’s a pain in the ass. Instead you can just run the following commands while ssh’d into your iPhone:

Get a list of all the default installed apps (and some Cydia apps):
find /Applications/ -name Info.plist -exec plutil -key CFBundleIdentifier {} \; |sort

Get a list of all the downloaded apps:
find /User/Applications/ -name iTunesMetadata.plist -exec plutil -key softwareVersionBundleId {} \; | sort

Those commands should spit out a list of bundle names. You should be able to guess most of them, and then ones you don’t know? Well, just open them. Here’s a list of some of the default ones:

com.apple.AdSheetPhone com.apple.AppStore com.apple.DemoApp com.apple.Maps com.apple.MobileAddressBook com.apple.MobileSMS com.apple.MobileStore com.apple.Preferences com.apple.TrustMe com.apple.VoiceMemos com.apple.WebSheet com.apple.calculator com.apple.camera com.apple.compass com.apple.fieldtest com.apple.gamecenter com.apple.iosdiagnostics com.apple.iphoneos.iPodOut [Music] com.apple.mobilecal com.apple.mobileipod com.apple.mobilemail com.apple.mobilenotes com.apple.mobilephone com.apple.mobilesafari com.apple.mobileslideshow com.apple.mobiletimer com.apple.nike com.apple.purplebuddy com.apple.reminders com.apple.stocks com.apple.videos com.apple.weather com.apple.webapp com.apple.youtube