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iPhone File System


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·Nov 3, 2024

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Hey guys, these mad kids on one. Today, I'm going to be showing you a few files that I found on the iPhone that interested me.

First of all, I'm running a legit copy of 3.0 from Apple, and I have not jailbroken this phone. Instead, since I'm a developer, I've built a Finder application for the iPhone and compiled it onto my iPhone. So here is the icon—just a regular Finder icon.

If you click it, it opens up. Here it is. I'm going to be showing you in this video some interesting files that I located on the iPhone that are kind of cool. The first one is in /applications/mobile music player. So let me just find it; it's kind of hard to see right here.

Okay, now inside of Mobile Music Player, we have the icons for the iPod touch, things that, uh, the sound icon. I have this icon file on my iPhone. I found out where it is on the iPhone; everything's in Mobile Music Player's package contents, same with this video icon. I just blew it up a little bit so that way you can see it.

There also, um, this is similar to regular iPhone apps. I will point out that all these files are owned by the user root, and the group is admin. I didn't know that the group on the iPhone was called admin.

Another thing is in /system/library, and it's called a SpringBoard app. This is in fact, if you're thinking, it's core services, by the way. Um, it's called SpringBoard, that app right here, and that is your home screen. That's the application that is your home screen.

There are all these different battery outcomes. Does this look familiar to you when you plug in your iPhone or iPod touch and it's charging? Well, because this is, um, here, all these different battery levels or files on your iPhone. This is a little less charged.

Now the other thing is the batteries. This is the reception—ooh, sorry—the reception bars right here. I'm just going to go down. Here's just a bunch of other cool pictures in there. I noticed a few other things.

Um, let me just find them. A little cut here. Here are some interesting files right here. This is the keypad when your iPhone or iPod touch is locked when nothing is pressed. So it's actually an image in here.

I'm sorry, it is the keyboard with every single key pressed, and it knows how to deal with these images to make it look like one key is pressed at a time. Oops! And I think that's pretty cool. I know how to do that with like CSS, but they figured out how to do it in Objective-C.

The last thing, here's the emergency call picture executable. So right here, and I'm going to do some more exploring. Right here is this interesting sound file I found. Let me just play it for you real quickly. Sound familiar? It's the sound when you unlock your iPhone. There it is.

So that's a very cool, um, few things I figured out. This Mobile Finder app does read, does in fact, read PDFs, stuff like that. Here's the lock sound—it's like a machine gun.

Okay, so I personally think that, um, these files are cool. I also found the package contents of all the other applications. I found the boot scripts; those boot scripts are kind of fun to mess around with a little bit. Everything is owned by root, so my application cannot edit it.

I did go into /etc/passwd. I'll just show you that. /etc/passwd, here's a password file. You can see that there is a nobody user, there is a root user, and it's, um, sorry someone texted me, and its password is in fact 'alpine' right there—that's the hash though.

There's a user mobile, which is the user that this is running as. Its password is also 'alpine', but that's kind of fun. There aren't the terminal commands that you get when you jailbreak.

Aren't really here, like /bin doesn't have ls in it, stuff like that. When you jailbreak and install the BSD subsystem, it can get all those commands for you right away, but Apple doesn't need those, so why bother putting them in?

So that is a little overview of the iPhone's files and the files on the iPhone. I believe that it does have an HFS+ file system, but I could be wrong, and just assume so. If I'm wrong, please correct me.

So, um, that is a tour of the iPhone or iPod Touch's disk. I will...

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