Determine the Application IDs for Mobile Applications

Before configuring the threat defense headend to allow application-based VPN from mobile devices, you must determine which applications should be allowed in the tunnel.

We strongly recommend that you configure the per-app policy in the MDM on the user’s mobile device. This simplifies the headend configuration. If you decide to configure the list of allowed applications on the headend, you must determine the application IDs for each application on each type of endpoint.

The application ID, called the bundle ID in iOS, is a reverse DNS name. You can use an asterisk as a wildcard. For example, *.* indicates all applications, com.cisco.* indicates all Cisco applications.

To determine the application IDs:

  • Android—Go to Google Play in a web browser and select the Apps category. Click (or hover over) an application that you want to allow, then look at the URL. The app id is in the URL, on the id= parameter. For example, the following URL is for Facebook Messenger, so the app id is com.facebook.orca.

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.orca

    For applications that are not available through Google Play, such as your own applications, download a package name viewer application to extract the app ID. There are many of these applications available, one of them should provide what you need, but Cisco does not endorse any of them.

  • iOS—There is no straight-forward way to get the bundle ID. Following is one way to find it:

    1. Use a desktop web browser such as Chrome to search for the application name.

    2. In the search results, look for the link to download the app from the Apple App Store. For example, Facebook Messager would be similar to:

      https://apps.apple.com/us/app/messenger/id454638411

    3. Copy the number after the id string. In this example, 454638411.

    4. Open a new browser window, and add the number to the end of the following URL:

      https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=

      For this example: https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=454638411

    5. You will be prompted to download a text file, usually named 1.txt. Download the file.

    6. Open the file in a text editor such as WordPad, and search for bundleId. For example:

      "bundleId":"com.facebook.Messenger",

      In this example, the bundle ID is com.facebook.Messenger. Use this as the app ID.

Once you have your list of application IDs, you can configure the policy as explained in .