Secrets and Lies

Turns out, my entire previous post was trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

I assumed, because I’d heard rumors about it and found this authoritative-sounding forum post, that Apple had indeed removed the persistence of Keychain entries for an app if a user deleted the app from their iOS device.

But while Apple did this in a beta release, they didn’t ship it in the final version (thanks to Nick Lockwood for pointing this out to me).

I verified this for myself with the new sample project Secrets, and you can too by downloading and running it for yourself, on both iOS 10 and iOS 11.

The app just shows a simple view with one text field, where you can type in anything you’d like. It is then saved in the app’s Keychain.

If you kill the app and come back to it, that value is again displayed.

If you delete the app and reinstall it, the value is still displayed. This is true both in the iOS 10.3.1 Simulator and the iOS 11 Simulator in Xcode 9 beta 4.

Now, in the iOS 11 Simulator, due to a bug, you can’t delete an app through the regular Simulator user interface.

So instead, you must delete it by hand from the file system, by going to ~/Developer/Library/CoreSimulator/Devices/, finding the UUID that matches that of the Simulator you’re using, then within that finding the UUID of your app, inside data/Containers/Bundle/Application.

But if you go through all that trouble in iOS 11 Simulator, then restart the Simulator and verify that the app is gone, then reinstall it…the Keychain entry is still there.

So you don’t need to use Shared Web Credentials the way I described in my last blog post. You can continue to rely on local app Keychain entries to keep your users logged in, even if the user deletes your app and reinstalls it.

For now.