Earlier in this chapter, we covered how to obtain more information about how applications communicate with servers. Here, we're going to take a brief look at how you can obtain more information about the data and/or binaries within an app. In apps, these are usually compiled, so you will not typically see raw source code. Most application vendors will not provide you with access to their source code either.

IPA files are zipped application bundles. You can unzip them before attempting to disassemble the binary. To do so, you can right-click on an IPA file and open it with Archive Utility to quickly unzip an app bundle. Inside the resulting folder, you'll see a Payload folder that contains the app itself. Once you can see the app, you can view the package contents on the app bundle and locate the binary file within. Unfortunately, in many cases although you can view the strings, attempting to disassemble an iOS app binary with a tool like Hopper can be fruitless because...