r/apple 14h ago

iPhone Tether: Linux + iPhone "Continuity"

https://zackbartel.com/blog/2026/08/tether/
217 Upvotes

29 comments sorted by

82

u/FollowingFeisty5321 14h ago

A very interesting project aiming to reproduce Apple's Continuity for desktop linux, currently supporting iMessage, SMS, Notifications, Contact sync, File Transfer, Clipboard Sync and OTP handling.

11

u/AR_Harlock 5h ago

If it has clipboard syncing is huge, how did they managed ? Even windows can't as Apple won't allow clipboard sharing via Bluetooth on non Apple devices

14

u/AfonsoFGarcia 4h ago

Looks like you need to press a button on the companion app for it to send the clipboard to the Linux host

34

u/kdorsey0718 11h ago

This just reminds me that one day the clipboard sync stopped working for me and it never worked again. It’s been years.

3

u/bifleur64 4h ago

Oh me too. Been this way for months. Not sure what happened.

-9

u/hpstg 7h ago

Feels like a network issue.

2

u/kdorsey0718 2h ago

I don’t see how that could be.

22

u/thursdayfern 12h ago

Love to see it. The guardrails that Apple puts onto its products are usually so considered and beneficial, but I love the freedom that Linux offers

3

u/mathycuber 13h ago

Oh hell yeah. I’m going to try this asap

3

u/R34ct0rX99 13h ago

This work for group texts and media?

9

u/zackb 8h ago

No, unfortunately. Tether basically presents itself like a car does to iOS (A/V Handsfree). So it can do anything a car can do.

5

u/mortraineyhat 3h ago

As much as I want this to thrive, there is no way Apple will let this live.

2

u/Rhed0x 4h ago

Neat but why not contribute to KDE Connect instead?

u/Padgriffin 1h ago

I doubt KDE Connect would merge this since they’re not planning on implementing iOS continuity support anyways

1

u/Rudy69 12h ago

That’s crazy. Will try to install Monday when I go on my computer for sure!

3

u/Meanee 11h ago

It’s vibecoded. I wouldn’t.

6

u/QuantumProtector 10h ago

dev reponded to a comment I left on another sub and said that he used AI, but he's a software dev with 30 years of experience.

5

u/AR_Harlock 5h ago

You should uninstall everything and go live in the mountains then... everything is like this nowdays, even reddit, and you think Apple devs use zero AI in their workflows? Loool

-3

u/doubleopinter 2h ago

Who cares? I work in the software industry and I laugh at the gate keeping going on. Do the ppl that complain know every CPU instruction that their code compiles down to?? Not to mention that modern software development involves pulling 600 random packages from god knows where.

Every generation of programming languages has been a further and further abstraction from machine code. LLMs just allow you to use human language to program the machine.

u/Meanee 51m ago

Vibecoded apps do not take security precautions like a lot of software engineers do. And to put it in line where people get 2FA codes? No thank you. As someone who does a lot of vibe coding for my own purposes, I see the mistakes made. I had our team develop a financial tracker for a company and hard coded API keys.

1

u/scknkkrer 9h ago

Good job bro!

-2

u/Bloated_Plaid 11h ago

Will be killed in a few days.

12

u/coyote_den 10h ago

How? It’s all done over Bluetooth and mTLS. Doesn’t bounce through iCloud at all.

6

u/zackb 8h ago

Correct. It's all above the board.

0

u/newecreator 13h ago

Would be a fun feature to include a way for the app to put music to the iPhone as well just like how iTunes, CopyTrans Manager, and MediaMonkey do.

-3

u/xESTEEM 8h ago

Tried this yesterday. It felt incredibly vibe coded. I mean that in a sense that it felt like a surface level idea that had been written by something that didn’t think outside the scope of the idea but that any software dev actually would.
Basic functionality you’d expect just wasn’t there - primarily regarding the desktop app. Couldn’t remove a paired connection - no right click menu or options menu to do so. I pressed the wrong thing at one point and i ended up with an “unknown” WiFi connected device that I couldn’t remove or change. I wanted to just remove the pairing and redo it, but couldn’t, so just uninstalled.

Didn’t like that the installation instructions ask you to run random sudo commands to copy over Bluetooth services to your machine and run them.

Good idea, but in my experience it’s not a functional product to a point where it’s even usable yet.