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MobileDeviceKit

A convenient Swift API for interacting with mobile devices on macOS.

About

MobileDeviceKit aims to make it easy to discover and interact with mobile devices attached to the system in a Swift application. Internally, MobileDeviceKit interops with Apple's private MobileDevice.framework which is used internally by other Apple programs such as Xcode, Finder, and Apple Configurator.

MobileDeviceKit is incomplete and is a work-in-progress.

Goals

• Asynchronous APIs by default using modern tools (such as Async Swift and Combine).
• Full abstraction for any private APIs used internally.
• Support for interacting with wirelessly-connected devices.
• Support for launching applications with lldb.

Why shouldn't I use this?

• You are building a mission-critical app and can't justify debugging issues with private APIs as they change.
• You need to bundle this package in a universal binary. MobileDeviceKit links against your system's frameworks, which may not be universal.
• There are probably other more actively maintained projects available (see below).

Why should I use this?

• You are building a macOS app in Swift and want to be able to easily interact with mobile devices.
• Your app is non-critical and you've accepted any risks with using private system APIs.
• You don't want to deal with managing reverse-engineered headers or interacting with MobileDevice's cumbersome C APIs directly.

Can I contribute?

Yes, please! If you have a need for this kind of package, please extend it to suit your needs. All and any contributions are welcome.

The symbol table for MobileDevice.framework can be dumped by running:

nm /Library/Apple/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework/Versions/Current/MobileDevice

If you prefer to reimplement parts of MobileDevice.framework instead without using the private framework, suggestions are welcome.

Alternatives

• CoreDevice via devicectl

  • CoreDevice is a first party framework that exposes a public, documented command line tool: devicectl.
  • The devicectl utility can be used to perform nearly all development-related tasks on wired and wirelessly-connected devices.
  • Note: CoreDevice only supports devices running iOS 17 or newer.

• Apple Configurator

  • Apple Configurator is a first party application that provides a public, documented command line tool: cfgutil.
  • You'll probably want to use this for most things. However, it does not support wirelessly connected devices or debugging.

Open source

• ios-deploy — Popular command line utility with support for launching installed apps.
• mobile-run — Utility for communicating with iOS devices written in TypeScript.
• libimobiledevice — Open source library written in C for communicating with iOS devices.
• mobiledevice — Command line utility.
• SDMMobileDevice — Drop-in open source replacement for MobileDevice.framework.
• mobdevim — Command line utility.

License

MobileDeviceKit is released under the GPL-3.0 License unless otherwise noted.