Is there any way to get own phone number by standard APIs from iPhone SDK?
9 Answers
No, there's no legal and reliable way to do this.
If you find a way, it will be disabled in the future, as it has happened with every method before.
Update: capability appears to have been removed by Apple on or around iOS 4
Just to expand on an earlier answer, something like this does it for me:
NSString *num = [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] stringForKey:@"SBFormattedPhoneNumber"];
Note: This retrieves the "Phone number" that was entered during the iPhone's iTunes activation and can be null or an incorrect value. It's NOT read from the SIM card.
At least that does in 2.1. There are a couple of other interesting keys in NSUserDefaults that may also not last. (This is in my app which uses a UIWebView)
WebKitJavaScriptCanOpenWindowsAutomatically
NSInterfaceStyle
TVOutStatus
WebKitDeveloperExtrasEnabledPreferenceKey
and so on.
Not sure what, if anything, the others do.
You cannot use iOS APIs alone to capture the phone number (even in a private app with private APIs), as all known methods of doing this have been patched and blocked as of iOS 11. Even if a new exploit is found, Apple has made clear that they will reject any apps from the app store for using private APIs to do this. See @Dylan's answer for details.
However, there is a legal way to capture the phone number without any user data entry. This is similar to what Snapchat does, but easier, as it does not require the user to type in their own phone number.
The idea is to have the app programmatically send a SMS message to a server with the app’s unique installation code. The app can then query the same server to see if it has recently received a SMS message from a device with this unique app installation code. If it has, it can read the phone number that sent it. Here’s a demo video showing the process. As you can see, it works like a charm!
This is not super easy to set up, but it be configured in a few hours at no charge on a free AWS tier with the sample code provided in the tutorial here.
AppStore will reject it, as it's reaching outside of application container.
Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area
Section 2.5.2 : https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#software-requirements
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