get the bundle id of app from PID in ios

Question

I am trying to get a list of all the background apps currently running on the iphone. I am able to do so but what I actually get is the a list of all the background app's PIDs.

So I have two questions,

First I am able to launch an app with its bundle id but not with its PID. Is launching an app with PID possible?

Second Is there a way to access the apps bundle id if all i have is its PID?

I understand this can be done on the mac with

[[NSRunningApplication runningApplicationWithProcessIdentifier:pid] bundleIdentifier]

but can it be done on the iphone?

Did I get you right - you wanna programmatically launch a background running app within another app? If so, I doubt it's possible, and for sure it's prohibited. — John Smith, Jul 20 '12 at 06:40
correct, well I forgot to mention I am trying to create a jailbreak tweak so maybe its possible? — Julio, Jul 20 '12 at 06:50
So you make apps for jailbroken devices? Apps that will make holes in devices' security and reputation? Just in case you listen to experienced developers advices - leave this dusk job. — John Smith, Jul 20 '12 at 07:02

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

I couldn't find NSRunningApplication in the iOS (public or private) 5.0 headers (I'm pretty sure I checked everywhere, but I could be wrong ...)

There's probably multiple ways to do this, but one of these should work ...

First, get information about the running processes. If you can't get the bundle ID, but can get the path to the app, then that's good enough. You could do that in one of a few ways:

1) See this answer on stack overflow or maybe this one. I'm not sure the executable path is available with these techniques ... I didn't explore them in depth.

2) You can get process information through the ps shell command. For example, with a ps -Aef command at the command line:

iPhone4:~/Applications/8AA99EA8-9CFC-4C17-9BD1-7C2812EDAAD4/Starbucks.app mobile$ ps -Aef
  UID   PID  PPID   C     STIME TTY           TIME CMD

  501   281     1   0   0:00.00 ??         1:02.39 /Applications/MobilePhone.app/MobilePhone
  501   282     1   0   0:00.00 ??         2:26.40 /Applications/MobileMail.app/MobileMail
  501   479     1   0   0:00.00 ??         5:45.01 /Applications/MobileSafari.app/MobileSafari
  501   490     1   0   0:00.00 ??         0:45.62 /Applications/Music~iphone.app/Music~iphone
  501   912     1   0   0:00.00 ??         0:17.65 /var/mobile/Applications/8AA99EA8-9CFC-4237-9BD1-7C2812AAAAD4/Starbucks.app/Starbucks
  501  1933     1   0   0:00.00 ??         0:51.72 /var/mobile/Applications/9962D9AE-087C-4D2E-A6AB-151230DBCDB09/Skype.app/Skype
  501  2106     1   0   0:00.00 ??         1:11.68 /var/mobile/Applications/20DCED79-B1EE-48F4-B3E1-75E9C25A0908C/Netflix.app/Netflix
  501  2259     1   0   0:00.00 ??         0:03.83 /Applications/Stocks.app/Stocks
  501  2292     1   0   0:00.00 ??         0:07.05 /var/mobile/Applications/33713030-9D3D-4BAC-8182-282973B2E5E0/ZillowMap.app/ZillowMap
  501  2568     1   0   0:00.00 ??         0:12.91 /var/mobile/Applications/55216130-10D8-498C-B477-AD18A4982E18/eBay.app/eBay
  501  2587     1   0   0:00.00 ??         0:05.10 /var/mobile/Applications/2A8DEAAD-8244-45C0-BEA9-20DA290B0117/Moviefone.app/Moviefone

I removed some of the output, but you can see some of the apps running (*.app).

So, in your app, you could run "ps -Aef >> /var/mobile/Library/MyAppName/ps.txt" with a system or exec call, sending the output to a temporary file. Then, parse that file to get the results.

3) I also found a copy of the Darwin open source online, and hacked it up a little to collect this kind of data into a C string buffer, that can be parsed programmatically. Get the header and .c file here:

darwin.c

darwin.h

Include those two files in your Xcode project, and #include "darwin.h". Then, use it like so:

OS_initialize();
size_t buffSize = 20000;  // you may need to increase this!
char buffer[buffSize];

int bytes = OS_get_table(buffer, buffSize);
if (bytes > 0) {
    self.textView.text = [NSString stringWithCString: buffer encoding: NSASCIIStringEncoding];
}

Now that you have the apps' install locations, open up the Info.plists under those directories

NSString* filename = @"/var/mobile/Applications/8AA99EA8-9CFC-4237-9BD1-7C2812EDAAD4/Starbucks.app/Info.plist";
NSDictionary* dict = 
    [[NSDictionary alloc] initWithContentsOfFile: filename];
NSString* bundleID = [dict valueForKey: @"CFBundleIdentifier"];

and read their bundle IDs.

In order to make this work, you may need to gain root privileges for your app.

See here on how to do that.

get the bundle id of app from PID in ios

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