libimobiledevice

What is libimobiledevice?

libimobiledevice is an open source software library written in C that enables developers to communicate with iOS devices using their native protocols. It is a cross-platform library tested on Linux, macOS, Windows and Android. It works with devices such as iPhones, iPads, iPods and Apple TVs, does not depend on any proprietary Apple libraries and does not require jailbreaking. The project has been in development since August 2007, when its goal was to bring support for these devices to the Linux desktop.

libimobiledevice allows users to interact with their iOS devices over a USB connection.

Features:

• It implements many high-level interfaces for device services on top of an object-oriented architecture and service abstraction layer.
• It provides access to the filesystem of a device and to the documents of file sharing apps.
• It can retrieve information about a device and modify various settings, such as the device name and date.
• It can back up and restore a device in a native way compatible with iTunes.
• It can install, remove and list apps and manage the arrangement of app icons on the home screen.
• It can activate a device using Apple's official servers.
• It can manage contacts, calendars, notes and bookmarks.
• It can retrieve and remove crash reports and read various diagnostics information.
• It can establish a debug connection for app debugging and expose a connection for WebKit remote debugging.
• It can mount filesystem images, take screenshots of the device screen and simulate a changed location (the last two need a mounted developer image).
• It can forward device notifications, manage provisioning profiles and relay the device syslog.
• It supports network connections with devices that have "WiFi sync" enabled.
• It lets you choose OpenSSL, GnuTLS or MbedTLS to handle SSL communication.
• It provides Cython-based bindings for Python.
• It bundles command-line utilities such as idevice_id, ideviceinfo, idevicename, idevicepair, idevicebackup2, idevicecrashreport, idevicediagnostics, ideviceimagemounter, idevicescreenshot, idevicesetlocation, idevicesyslog and afcclient.
• The idevicebackup2 utility creates and restores backups of devices running iOS 4 or later, while idevicebackup handles legacy backups.
• The ideviceenterrecovery utility puts a device into recovery mode, and idevicedebugserverproxy forwards a debugserver connection for remote debugging.
• The idevicebtlogger utility captures Bluetooth HCI traffic from a device when a logging profile is installed, and idevicedate shows or sets the device date.
• Related tools from the same team include ideviceinstaller, idevicerestore and ifuse, which mounts the device filesystem.
• It is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1; version 1.4.0 was released in October 2025.
• It is an independent project that has not been authorized, sponsored or approved by Apple.
• On Windows it needs Apple Mobile Device Support, which is installed together with iTunes.
• The download is the source code package with autogen.sh build scripts, so it has to be compiled before use.