From time to time there I face a problem how to convert the plist file from binary representation back to XML. This problem usually occurs when you need to extract project plist file from IPA archive and see what’s inside. This is complicated by the fact that the IPA builder (xcrun utility) compresses everything possible to reduce the size of the application, and probably this accelerates application launch. So after I painfully searched the solution for fifth time I’ve decided to store it to my blog.

You can make it easy with plutil command line tool which is the part of Xcode development kit.

plutil -convert xml1 some_file.plist

And maybe you will ever need back conversion from XML to binary:

plutil -convert binary1 some_other_file.plist

Caution! this will overwrite source file. If you need to keep it, use -o option to store result in different path

plutil -convert xml1 some_file.plist -o result.plist