Apple ingest

Apple ingest is how this site gets Apple’s carrier bundles: from the iOS images (IPSWs) of every in-scope iPhone, one build at a time, and from the bundles Apple publishes through its carrier bundle manifest. iPad and Apple Watch bundles come only from the manifest.

Feeds

Source	Requests	Gives
ipsw.me	`api.ipsw.me/v4/devices`, `/v4/device/<identifier>?type=ipsw`	device names; each phone’s release IPSWs and their dates
AppleDB	`api.appledb.dev/device/main.json`, `/ios/index.json`, `/ios/iOS;<build>.json`	each device’s boards, release day and name; beta IPSWs, which ipsw.me does not list
Apple’s manifest	the iTunes `version` plist	the published bundles, their digests and the SIM tables

The IPSW check runs every 20 minutes; the manifest check, every 6 hours.

iOS builds

A unit is one build with all its in-scope IPSWs, not one IPSW: each IPSW carries only the override files of its own phones, so a bundle is only whole once every IPSW of the build is read. In 24A446, the iPhone18,1 IPSW’s copy of ATT_US has 8 files, against 47 in a copy merged from every IPSW of the build. Phones that share one IPSW file share one download.

The build is held once releases/ios/<build>.json is written; its metadata lists the phones it holds, so a phone listed for the build later plans it again.

The IPSW job

Each IPSW is one step in the container, one after another:

Step	What
1	Open the IPSW in place: its zip directory and `BuildManifest.plist` over HTTP Range. The build must be the one planned.
2	Read each modem firmware package by Range, store it in `obj/`, and write its summary to `decoded/baseband/`.
3	Stream the root filesystem image the manifest names to disk. When it is a `.dmg.aea` (Apple Encrypted Archive), decrypt it on the way: the archive’s key is wrapped (HPKE) in its auth data next to the URL of the private key that opens it, which Apple serves openly.
4	Copy `/System/Library/Carrier Bundles/iPhone` and `/System/Library/CountryBundles/iPhone` out of the APFS image with `apfs-extract`, a Go helper over blacktop/go-apfs that needs no mount.
5	Pack each bundle into a deterministic `.ipcc` and put it in the unit’s `tmp/`.

The AEA format and key schedule follow blacktop/ipsw’s pkg/aea.

Merge

The last step runs in the Worker. For each bundle, the copies from the build’s IPSWs are compared file by file:

copies that are identical are stored as they are;
otherwise the files are merged into one bundle and packed again. Any file that differs between IPSWs fails the build, and so does any file missing from one IPSW, unless it is an override file.

Each bundle is stored once in obj/<sha256> and normalized into its profile. A bundle’s content id (cid) is a SHA-256 over every file’s path and SHA-256, so two archives of the same files have one content id however they were zipped. The release record names, per bundle, its hash, version, size and content id, and lists the build’s modem packages with the phones each IPSW installs.

The OTA manifest

The check compares the manifest’s SHA-1 with the one last planned. A new manifest is stored at ota/apple/manifests/<sha1>.plist and becomes a unit.

The unit plans each file the manifest lists, within scope, whose record is missing or whose listings changed (the bundle name, OS version and model it is listed under). Each file is one step:

Download it over the scheme its URL names, then the other one. IPCC § Hosts and paths lists the hosts.
Check it against every digest the manifest states, SHA-1 and SHA-384.
Store it in obj/, normalize it, and write its record to ota/apple/files/<sha256 of its URL>.json.

A file that answers 4xx over both schemes, or whose bytes do not match a stated digest (Apple replaced it and kept the old digest), is left unheld, and the next manifest plans it again. A file Apple stops listing has its listings marked no longer live.

The manifest’s SIM tables (MobileDeviceCarriersByMccMnc and the rest) become routes rows: which SIM rules send a SIM to which bundle (Indexing).

Scope

Platform	Read
iOS	IPSWs: iPhones released since September 2023. OTA: every file
iPadOS	OTA only: each bundle’s file for the newest OS it is listed for, no betas
watchOS	the same