Charles Proxy Tutorial for iOS | raywenderlich.com

Learn how you can use Charles for iOS and macOS to inspect encrypted and unencrypted network traffic for both your own apps and third party apps.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.raywenderlich.com/1827524-charles-proxy-tutorial-for-ios

Same thing can be achieved with Postman (https://www.getpostman.com) that can run in Proxy mode.

VPN can be used on iOS without any issues. There are a lot of different VPN solutions for iOS, recommend you checking out reviews on Mullvad on this site, it’s a good one.

Excellent tutorial, thank you. I understand why we need to disable the Proxy on the iPhone while we are done working with Charles but why do we need to also deleted the CA certificate? Is it not safe to keep it installed?

@tomelliott Can you please help with this when you get a chance? Thank you - much appreciated! :]

Hi @nadgo

It really depends on what risks you’re willing to live with. Charles works by effectively allowing yourself to be man in the middle’d by yourself.

By keeping that certificate around you’re opening up a (very small) possibility of somebody abusing that.

It’s a lot less of a problem than it used to be - as Charles used to have a single certificate for everyone. Now it’s unique to you. But it’s still there. If you have an iOS device purely for testing/development, personally I would be very happy to leave it there for example.

Most of the VPNs we talked about today work well on Macs. However, CyberGhost, Nord VPN & tunnel bear are the best VPN for iphone that work on Macs, iPads aswell. Furthermore, they are designed to allow access to multiple devices on a single VPN service provider. This means that you can connect all your iOS devices at the same time.

This tutorial is more than six months old so questions are no longer supported at the moment for it. Thank you!