How Can I Extract an IPA from an iPhone for an App Downloaded from the App Store so that I can see the assets in the IPA?

Question

One of my favorite apps was removed from the app store, i guess because it hadn't been updated in too long. I have it on an old device (approx iOS 7.1.2) but did not download it onto my new phones.

How do I get the IPA so that I can look at the app bundle and see the assets in the app?

Answer 1

So, one of the possible solution to get into the assets of any app is using the iTunes and a little magic.

In your case you can easy synchronize your device with iTunes to get all apps from your devices copied into iTunes Media Folder:

And after that you can just unarchive an ipa file and navigate to Payload/AnAppName.app and there should be all assets of the application.

Sample with using your terminal:

$  cd ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Media/Mobile\ Applications/
$  tar -zxf Apple\ Store\ 401000.ipa
$  cd Payload/Apple\ Store.app/

And the result will be:

PS: instead of using bash for unarchiving, you can just change the extention of ipa-file from .ipa to .zip and after that double click on it.