Open Source iOS Library For Detecting Apps Installed On A User’s Device

There are a number of apps that are able to detect the apps on a user’s device and personalize the app experience based on those apps.

While there’s no API publicly available for doing this there are ways to get around this by searching through available URL schemes, and going through process ID’s.

Daniel Amitay has created a library called iHasApp that uses these techniques, and makes it easy to get the list of app’s on a users devices by using the above mentioned techniques along with the iTunes search API and Daniel’s app scheme database.

The library uses no hidden API’s and the readme states:

The iHasApp framework utilizes only public, documented, and non-deprecated APIs. It is completely App Store safe. There are already a number of approved apps on the App Store that have integrated iHasApp.

You can find the library on Github here with a full example and read about the used techniques on Daniel’s blog.

While you can’t simply grab 100% of the installed apps this is as good as it gets with the available APIs.