Fiddler Setup on Windows Computer to iPhone

Aaron Lin

Aaron Lin

February 9, 2020

4 min read

Tutorial

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This is my first guide on setting up Fiddler.
The documentation on Fiddler site is pretty good but but they're missing a little something.
This guide is focused on getting a Windows machines looking at iPhone's mobile traffic.
There will be some blog posts in the future where I use Fiddler so I think it's a good start for anyone who wants to try it themselves

Why should you use Fiddler? Well it's a good way to look at your mobile phone's traffic
An example, see how some of your apps interact by calling a backend and you can sometimes reverse engineer these backend calls on Postman

If you ever used Charles proxy or WireShark, it is essentially the same thing
I didn't have much luck with Charles proxy on Windows so this can serve as an alternative to it, plus Charles proxy has a 30 day trial period while Fiddler is entirely free.

Okay, you got me convinced! How do I set it up?

Disclaimer: This is done on a Windows 10 machine & iPhone 8 on iOS 13.3

Windows PC configuration

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1 Start by downloading Fiddler from this site Enter how you're planning to use Fiddler, your email, and country and accept the Fiddler End User Agreement

2 Open FiddlerSetup.exe and click Yes

3 Accept license with I agree

4 Install location folder location and click Install

5 Download the Certificate Maker plugin for Fiddler

6 Open fiddlercertmaker.exe and click Yes

7 Installation complete message, hit OK

8 Open Fiddler, press Cancel for AppContainer message

9 Enable HTTPS traffic decryption

  • Go to Tools > Options... > HTTPS

  • Click checkbox Decrypt HTTPS traffictitle='

  • Hit OK on the Options window

10 Allow remote computers to connect

  • Go to Tools > Options... > Connections

  • Click checkbox Allow remote computers to connect

  • Hit OK from popup window

  • Hit OK on the Options window

11 Restart Fiddler

12 Ensure your firewall allows incoming connections to the Fiddler process, and that it's not blocking all incoming connections, including those in the list of allowed apps.

13 Hover over the Online indicator at the far right of the Fiddler toolbar to display the IP addresses assigned to Fiddler's machine. Note this down for step 17. Usually this is the bottommost IP address if you have multiple IP addresses

iPhone device configuration

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14 Go to Settings > Wi-Fi

15 Find your current network and click the (i) icon

16 Scroll to the bottom and open up HTTP Proxy

17 Choose Manual, type your IP address in the Server field and type the Fiddler listening port (8888 by default) in the Port field. Keep Authentication off

18 Hit Save

19 Go to Safari. It has to be Safari, not Chrome! Open up http://ipv4.fiddler:8888

20 Click FiddlerRoot certificate. Click Allow

21 If there is a prompt, choose iPhone for device to download this certificate to

22 Click Close for Profile Downloaded

22 Click on Profile Downloaded under Settings in your iPhone

23 Click Install for the DO_NOT_TRUST_FiddlerRoot profile

24 Enter your passcode if you have one

25 Hit Install when warning message comes up and click Install again

26 Click Done afterwards for Profile Installed

27 Go to Settings > About > Certificate Trust Settings. It should be located at the bottom

28 Turn on the Certificate you downloaded. Click Continue for Root Certificate warning

29 You're done! When you go to any site or app, you should now see traffic being logged into the Fiddler app on your desktop

30 You can turn this off by going to the HTTP Proxy in the Wi-Fi and configure the proxy to Off

Hopefully this guide has helped you out. I wanted to make this guide as a way to guide others and remind myself if I need to re-install Fiddler.

Let me know what you think!

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Developed by Aaron Lin
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