Debug iOS traffic on iPhone device

Debug iOS traffic on iPhone device

I’m doing production support for an iOS mobile app. The pain point is hard to debug HTTPS traffic between the iPhone and our server. In this article, I will explain how to capture the requests, response and the HTTP headers.

Step 1:

Download and install Charles: https://www.charlesproxy.com/download/ on your laptop. Click install “Charles Root Certificate on a Mobile Device or Remote Browser”.

Then you would see a popup with details above.

Step 2:

Use your iPhone connect to the same wifi network. In the iPhone wifi setting, you can choose HTTP proxy, click on Configure Proxy with Manual details:

Fill in the Server and Port number from the same info of the popup. You would then see the popup updated for the connection:

Next, open the Safari in your iPhone and browse to chls.pro/ssl to download and install the certificate by clicking allow:

Click “Install” of the Profile:

And you are done:

Step 3:

In your iPhone device, go to Setting > General > About > Certificate Trust Settings and toggle the Charles Proxy CA to on.

Finally, step:

Restart Charles, you can then see the traffic with https content! For example, the medium app on iOS traffic is captured as shown below:

Let me know if you encounter any problem. Happy Debugging :)