Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Brute-force URL Scheme Discovery tool for iPhone and iPad




Many iPhone and iPad apps support custom URL schemes that can be used to launch the apps. However, app developers do not always publicly advertise these URL schemes. I have written a simple tool that tries out every possible URL scheme to see which ones are supported by apps on the device. Run it overnight on your phone to discover hidden supported URL schemes! It works its way up from shorter permutations to longer ones. Longer URL schemes are likely undiscoverable with this approach due to excessive memory (it does a breadth-first-search) and runtime requirements. I may modify this at some point to be able to support longer URL discovery by enhancing the algorithm. However, you can easily modify the app to start with a prefix if you want to prune down the number of URLs to try out.

Download the source code now from GitHub.