Apple Internals

This repository provides tools and information to help understand and analyze the internals of Apple’s operating system platforms. Information is collected in a text file and presented on a website. A Nix flake allows to build the following externally hosted tools:

acextract
Unpacks asset catalogs to individual files.

dyld-shared-cache-util
Extracts dynamic libraries from the dyld linker cache.

snapUtil
Manages APFS snapshots.

The Makefile aggregates various kinds of information from the system in a SQLite database and checks the internals text file against this information. Collected details include:

• all file names of the installed macOS and the iOS, tvOS, and watchOS simulators
• linkages of binaries to libraries
• entitlements for all executables
• plain-text strings embedded in binaries
• launchd service descriptions and bundle Info.plist content
• lists of assets inside asset catalogs

This work is licensed under the MIT license so you can freely use and share as long as you retain the copyright notice and license text.