At the start of the month, we showed you a utility dubbed IPA Ranger by iOS developer 0xkuj, which is a graphical user interface for the ipatool command line-based utility that lets users download the .ipa files of owned apps from the App Store directly via their Apple ID.
At the time, IPA Ranger was a paid release that donned a $0.99 price tag; but as we knew at the time of release, the developer planned to make the package free and open source. As of this week, that has officially happened and IPA Ranger is available for free.
IPA Ranger works by providing a user interface where users may sign in with their Apple ID, choose their country, view search results and tap on a desired app, download it at their leisure. Another cool feature of IPA Ranger is that it supports managing downloading apps — installing, renaming, sharing, and deleting.
One thing worth noting is that IPA Ranger only lets you download the .ipa file for apps you already own, which means you can’t simply download apps you don’t own or share your apps with others. Instead, IPA Ranger is designed to let you back up .ipa files for apps that may or may not be pulled from the App Store at Apple’s discretion or that you may want to mod with tweaks before sideloading with utilities like AltStore or Sideloadly.
Now that IPA Ranger is free to use, everyone has the choice of using the ipatool command line interface or IPA Ranger graphical user interface at no cost. Obviously, the GUI is going to be the most user-friendly option, so we’d suggest giving it a try if this sounds interesting to you.
You can also view the IPA Ranger source code on GitHub if you’re interested in learning more about how it works. The GitHub page also contains the IPA Ranger .ipa file so that you can sideload it to get started.
Are you planning to give IPA Ranger a try now that it’s available as a free download? Be sure to let us know in the comments section down below.