theiostream

SearchLoader

It’s been 7 months since I published my first article on this subject: Spotlight. Yes. That long. I will soon (that is, in a matter of hours) be writing a new technical writeup on the subject, named Hacking the iOS Spotlight, v2.

Let me start by telling you a bit about how research was prior, and after the publishing of the article.

The whole thing started with a project I had with Ariel Aouizerate and Eliran Manzeli nicknamed Spotlight+, which aimed to extend Spotlight by displaying selected search results in a different way. This has not yet been implemented, even though it was the start of it all, and since the future of this project is yet unknown, I won’t disclose much else about it.

We soon realized that Spotlight lacked the categories of results we all wanted. Ariel thought we should display whatever we displayed through a SearchCommands-like thing, but I figured, since we were doing this, we were going to do it right.

So the project changed its focus to a whole new direction. It was no longer about making Spotlight more practical, but about adding a whole new set of functionalities to it. Adding custom search results.

Then research started. I spent a week studying the SpringBoard, searchd and AppIndexer layers of it, and in a hurry released Hacking the iOS Spotlight in this blog.

The article covered an overview of existing software which extended Spotlight, a bit about the two kinds of search plugins – Search Bundles and the nicknamed Spotlight Bundles, and how both functioned, and a small naïve description of what domains were.

That writeup lacked two vital pieces of information, and had one error at its first release (which was then corrected with further research). It lacked:

• Information about loading Search.framework;
• Information about SPSpotlightManager, which should be used instead of SPDaemonConnection directly for AppIndexer-related purposes;
• The error: The actual purpose of -allIdentifiersInCategory: in a Spotlight bundle.

Ever since, research has progressed into a complete piece of software, named SearchLoader, which, as the name says, loads Search bundles and tricks Extended.searchBundle into loading our Spotlight bundles.

It was no simple task, but it will soon, as one would expect, be opensourced, with a through API documentation (in the upcoming technical article).

Loader started simply as a buggy loading thing, but it soon evolved into a stable Loader + Library set, with a lot of stuff one might need when developing their own search plugins. And when I see the first SearchLoader’s working code (which I had copied in my Mac) and compare it with the current code, I can barely believe it evolved so much.

With some short breaks from this project, I worked on some unfinished tweaks, did TweetAmplius, fixed stuff for iOS 6, wrote some of the Theos Docs, did some work on Oligos, re-beat the Mass Effect saga, played some Minecraft and Civilization, but now, it’s finished! I honestly can’t believe this!

To end this “say everything yet nothing” article, this wouldn’t have been possible without the tools of the trade: class-dump, IDA, dyld_decache, and so forth.

And a huge thanks goes to my friends at the jailbreak community. Without them I would have most likely given up on this ;P.

So, expect cool stuff I’ve coded to come alongside Loader, and I’ll hopefully expect from you some cool plugins for SearchLoader. :)