TLDR Dev · ARTICLES & TUTORIALS

A DEEP DIVE INTO APPLE'S .CAR FILE FORMAT

dbg.re29 min read

Summary from the TLDR Dev newsletter

Apple's undocumented `.car` file format is used for Asset Catalogs in iOS/macOS applications. The format's foundation includes BOM files and B+ trees, along with various rendition data types and compression schemes. This article goes over the complex internal structures, showing how assets are stored and retrieved.