Get CellID, LAC, … on iOS 8.3

Question

Since iOS 5.X, I used to get radio information with these methods : Get CellID, MCC, MNC, LAC, and Network in iOS 5.1

But with the iOS 8.3 beta (and 8.3 GM), this private API

_CTServerConnectionCellMonitorCopyCellInfo

doesn't work anymore.

Answer 1

Apple was informed about weakness in their CoreTelephony, so now calls to CoreTelephony fail. They are checking if the caller is sandboxed, so after debug you can see:

Caller not allowed to perform action: TelephonyApiTest.240, action = sandboxed lookup, code = 1: Operation not permitted, uid = 501, euid = 501, gid = 501, egid = 501, asid = 0

However, there are still few calls which works, for example:

_CTServerConnectionCopyWakeReason
_CTServerConnectionCopyVoiceMailInfo

etc ... I haven't tried all.

The big problem now is you cannot even get a signal strength as CTGetSignalStrength always returns 0.

And when you tried some resticted call like in your case _CTServerConnectionCellMonitorCopyCellInfo then you can see error code in CTError is 13 (Permission denied)

Answer 2

As of iOS 8.3 all of the above solutions require entitlement to work

    <key>com.apple.CommCenter.fine-grained</key>
<array>
    <string>spi</string>
</array>

Not only cell monitor is protected but it seems like all of the CoreTelephony notifications now require that entitlement to work. For example, kCTMessageReceivedNotification also affected.