Frequently Asked Questions

General

Dependencies requires macOS Big Sur 11.1 or later. To analyze complex apps, we recommend to use an Apple M1 machine.
If you want to suggest a feature, or have any other question, feel free to reach out to us at support@dependencies.app. We would love to hear your ideas!
If you found a bug in Dependencies, please reach out to us at support@dependencies.app. We will make sure to address these issues in future releases.
The easiest way to support Dependencies is to purchase the In-App purchase within the app itself. It will removes some limitations. If you like using Dependencies, take a minute and leave a review on the App Store. That helps a ton!

dSYM & Xcode archives

You can open dSYM files or Xcode archives in Dependencies.

If you compiled and submitted apps to App Store Connect, you should have Xcode archives located in the Organizer window in Xcode:

  1. Launch Xcode and display the Organizer window
  2. Select your app
  3. Display the Archives
  4. Select the archive of your app that interest you
  5. Right click and choose ‘Open With…’ and pick ‘Dependencies’

If you compiled and submitted apps to App Store Connect, you should have Xcode archives located in the Organizer window in Xcode:

  1. Launch Xcode and display the Organizer window
  2. Select your app
  3. Display the Archives
  4. Select the archive of your app that interest you
  5. Right click and choose ‘Show in Finder’
  6. Right click in the Finder on the ‘.xcarchive’ file and choose ‘Show Package Contents’
  7. Open the folder dSYMs to find all the dSYMs for this version of your app
  8. You can now open the dSYM file of your specific component in Dependencies
Sadly no. The dSYM files that you can download from the app Store Connect don’t contain all the information needed to create an interactive graph of your app.
You can open a xcarchive created by Xcode in Dependencies. All the dSYMs of all the components from this archive will appear in the same window.
Please make sure that you have set the Debug Information Format to DWARF with dSYM File in the target settings of your Xcode project. If this setting is not set, Xcode won’t generate the dSYM files and Dependencies is unable to create the interactive graph.

Interactive Graph

Object Oriented Programming is a programming paradigm based on the concept of objects. Dependencies analyzes the type of these objects and displays them with a color matching their type:

  • Blue represents a Class
  • Brown represents a Structure
  • Orange represents a Protocol
  • Green represents a Enum
An object with a lot of dependencies will have a bigger size than an object with a small amount of dependencies.

Export

  1. In Dependencies.app choose "File > Export as HTML…" and save the HTML file
  2. Use an HTML code like the following to embed your interactive graph:
    <div style="border-style: solid; border-width: 1px; width:320px; height:320px;">
     <object type="text/html" data="MyHTML.html" style="width:100%; height:100%;">
     </object>
    </div>

    You will obtain the following:

Command Line

Go in the Command Line tab of the preferences of Dependencies. Then follow the steps to enable the command line:

  1. Grant access to the command line tool.
  2. Run in the Terminal /Applications/Dependencies.app/Contents/MacOS/CLI/dependencies
  3. Optionally create for convenience a symlink with the command cd /usr/local/bin && sudo ln -s /Applications/Dependencies.app/Contents/MacOS/CLI/dependencies
Dependencies is distributed on the Mac App Store and is a sandboxed application with restricted access to the files. For the command line tool to be able to access files, you need to explicitly select a folder.

If you create the symlink for convenience, you just need to run the command dependencies in a Terminal window. The Dependencies command takes a .dSYM file as input and generates an HTML file as output. The following options are available.

  • -i <INPUT_DSYM_FILE_PATH>: The path to the dSYM file to analyze.
  • -o <OUTPUT_HTML_FILE_PATH>: The path to the output HTML file.

Note that in the output, you will see the Software Entropy.

Pricing & License

Dependencies can be downloaded for free on the Mac App Store. An optional In-App purchase unlocks a range of advanced features.