Inject system wide touch events on iOS7

Question

Prior to iOS7 it was possible to inject touch events with the GSSendSystemEvent and GSSendEvent private API calls, eg:

• GSSendEvent - Inject Touch Event iOS
• Simulating System Wide Touch Events on iOS
• System-wide tap simulation on iOS
• Send a global touch event on iOS 6

On iOS7 these calls seem to silently fail though. An alternative has been suggested in Simulating system-wide touches in iOS 7 but it only works on jailbroken devices. https://github.com/kif-framework/KIF looks like another option, but it appears that it only supports injecting events for the current app rather than system wide (so you couldn't inject a touch event while you're app is in the background, for example).

So how can you inject system wide touch events on iOS7, without a jailbreak?

Answer 1

I assume you need to do this system-wide for a testing scenario? In which case you might be well served by Apple's UI Automation framework, a JavaScript-based tool useful for on-device testing.

While you can't do things like simulate a home-button press, you can send your app to the background for a specified duration, for example:

UIATarget.localTarget().deactivateAppForDuration(seconds);

Here are the docs:

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/DeveloperTools/Reference/UIAutomationRef