Using an iPhone Without Windows or Apple Computers

I bought an iPhone 5 years ago. Admittedly, it was a strange choice: I don’t like proprietary software that one can not customize. I knew that iPhones work well only if one was willing to pay for subscription services like iCloud and Apple Music. The fights that Epic Games and Spotify have started in court over Apple’s attempts to block their native integration into iOS is well-known. But I bought one anyway, because I could not get an unlocked Android phone (back then) in Japan, and I certainly did not want to buy a locked phone, pay for overpriced cellular network coverage for 2 years before the phone could be unlocked and I could switch to a different carrier. So, an iPhone was the least worst option. Over the years, I have struggled with iPhone’s software to do basic things, such as writing a text file, transferring photos to a hard drive, understanding how exactly WhatsApp and other such apps store their pictures within the phone, optimizing to never go past the 30% disk usage mark because flash memory becomes extremely slow beyond it and makes the phone unusable, and using browsers like Firefox without the ability to install ad or tracker blocking plugins. This post is a summary of some of the things that I have learned.

One thing that is worth appreciating is that iPhone’s software is rather strange and has a lot of features, which apparently improve security. I don’t know enough to say whether that is actually the case. Nevertheless, most obstacles faced during the process of taking data out of the iPhone are related to intentional design choices which make interoperability impossible. Even in the cases where it is possible, various hoops need to be jumped through and the process is probably a nightmare for a layperson who just wants to get something done.

Photos And File Transfer

Just the past week, I started using KDE Connect. There is an application on the iOS app store which serves as the client, and the Gnome Shell extension GSConnect runs on the Linux host. Photos can be transferred in their original HEIF format over a local WiFi connection. The installation of both these components is very simple.

The transfer speed is very fast (the line rate of your WiFi network or the speed at which files can be written to your local disk, whichever is lower.) The only consideration is that the phone’s screen should not lock during the period that the photos are being transferred. I was able to transfer as many as 250 files in a single transfer. I can probably transfer up to a 1000 files, but I have not tried it out yet. (If you have tried it, tell me the hardware that you are using, and I will update this post with the information.)

The same approach can be used to transfer text files (more on this in the next section) or to control the cursor and enter text on your computer from your phone or connected device (not sure why this is ever required? Slideshow?)

KDE Connect works by starting a TCP/UDP server on a port on the host. (Usually the port number is 1716, but check your local installation’s output for the command ss -tulpn to find the actual port. The process name is gjs on Debian 11.) This port should be able to receive traffic on the local network:

$ ufw allow in on wlan0 proto tcp from 192.168.1.0/24 to 192.168.1.0/24 port 1716
Rule added

$ ufw allow in on wlan0 proto udp from 192.168.1.0/24 to 192.168.1.0/24 port 1716
Rule added

Note: One thing you should remember to do is to turn off Gnome Shell Extensions completely once you are done importing files. I have noticed that once a phone is paired, whenever both the phone and the computer are on the same network, they get connected automatically. I don’t want that to happen unless I am manually connecting for some reason. There is an authorization prompt when a phone is paired for the first time. But that authorization is a one-time process, and things such as controlling the cursor of the computer using the phone or entering text on the computer are possible once this process is completed. This is a minefield which is best avoided by turning off Extensions completely.

Old Process: Using Windows

If you are not able to use KDE Connect, the following process will work. It takes more time, requires a recent Windows OS installation, and lot of moving files around between Windows and Linux. I am leaving this here as a record of my old (painful) process.

About 3 years after buying the phone and taking pictures with it, I wanted to import photos to my hard drive and store them there, along with photos from my handheld digital camera. The motivation was mainly to store all my photos together in a single Shotwell database. An added advantage was that resetting the phone to factory defaults and starting fresh would speed it up significantly, increase battery life, and reduce overheating during charging.

There were many hurdles. The first few hurdles were fairly simple:

• Importing required a Windows OS running the horrible Windows application Windows Photos. Everything is “implicit.” So, you have to plug-in your phone and hope that the device is detected and an “Import Photos” option shows up. Apple has also seemed to have stopped maintaining iTunes, an application that I used several years ago to transfer MP3 files to an iPod.
• You can set the iPhone to import photos in the widely supported JPEG format, or in the original “HEIF” format, which was hard to work with. I set the option to import as JPEG as I wanted to handle JPEG photos rather than HEIF photos. (The reduced disk storage, which is a major reason for using HEIF, was not a big issue for me at the time.) But if you try to import too many pictures as JPEG, then the import process … goes kaput, for lack of a better phrase. There is no error message and the import process just stays stuck for a period of time and then fails with the super generic Import has failed. Please try again later. message. I think this must be because of the “import as JPEG” option because the conversion from HEIF to JPEG must be performed on the iPhone and it is probably too resource intensive to be completed on the iPhone within some timeout.
  • Recently, packages like heif-gdk-pixbuf and heif-thumbnailer have made working with HEIF files on Linux convenient. About a year ago, Shotwell also started supporting HEIF file variants. You need to be on the latest stable distribution version to be able to use the latest Shotwell version though. I tried to build the latest Shotwell version on a Debian 11 VM, and it was … very hard. I had to give up because many of the shared libraries which need to be linked are not updated on older distributions.
• Once you start importing files as HEIF files, the process works most of the time. I have found that it is unreliable if you attempt to import more than 200 photos at a time. So, I would go from the past to the present and select months to import.
• Don’t make the mistake of using albums on the iPhone because this metadata is not exposed at all and will be completely lost as soon as you bring the photos out of the iPhone. So, I have begun doing all of my categorization exclusively inside Shotwell.
• After importing the files in the HEIF format, they can be converted into JPEG using CopyTransHEIC. This is a free piece of software for Windows. However, the free version can only convert 100 photos at a time. So, you will have to select batches of 100 photos and convert them to JPEG. This is also mildly annoying when working with large photo collections, such as one that I worked with which had 5000 photos, everything from the first day the phone was bought to right before the import. In that case, I transferred the files back to Linux, put them in 50 folders each containing 99 files, and then went back to windows: Ctrl + A => Convert to JPEG => Wait => Proceed to next folder.

Welcome to using computers, 2024 edition.

Plaintext

Plaintext is the only truly universal file format.¹ A plaintext file written in the 1960s can still be read using the standard tools which are installed on every operating system, including mobile phones.

iOS is the exception that proves the rule, of course. The OS works tirelessly to confuse users into believing that files do not exist and that folders are a thing of the past. The recently added Files app is a pretty bad application and is slower than most feature phones from the 2010s. The recent changes on Google Drive have a similar motivation, in my opinion. This approach has also been a major part of why Gmail is so popular. It encourages users to maintain a huge set of files, which are not categorized well. The only way to get to the file that you want is to search.

First, coerce users into creating files haphazardly without thinking about where they should put a file. (“You need a Document? Just create it on the home screen of Google Drive!”) Then, once you have made this a habit, sell them recurring subscriptions to software that you now have to use to make sense of all the documents which were created.

The only solution I have found to this is the brilliant iOS application Subtext. It is a simple text editor, which does not need an Internet connection to start-up. (This is a problem with Notion, Evernote, and Fastmail; all of which I have used briefly.) Files created using Subtext can be synced to any computer using KDE Connect, the method that I described for photos.

Recently, I noticed that even Dropbox now has the ability to create a text file inside its app. Files created in the app are automatically synced to your Dropbox Cloud account and accessible from other devices on the same Dropbox account. This might be useful for you if you are unable to use KDE Connect.

SSH

Being able to SSH into a remote server running Linux from an iPhone is a pretty big advantage. This is not an absolute requirement and I have lived without this for five years. Recently though, I wanted to use Ledger to keep track of some expenses while on the move. I could use Subtext to write each expense in Ledger’s understated and simple format:

2024-07-20 Dinner
  Expenses:Food:Dinner  INR 450
  Liabilities:CC

After entering a few expenses, in order to validate the text file and balance the books, I would need to use Ledger’s CLI somewhere.

Terminus is my preferred solution for this. Terminus doubles as both an SFTP client (to transfer the text file to the remotely running Linux machine) and as an SSH client (providing the ability to run commands on the Linux machine.)

I did not plan this all out before leaving for my trip; and the whole idea began as a way to streamline the integration of expenses during the trip back into my “main” expenses file. So, while I was on my trip, I generated an SSH key on Terminus, added it to Digital Ocean, created a Linux VM there, SSH-ed in using Terminus, installed Legder and some other tools like ripgrep. The whole process was surprisingly smooth. So, credit to the Digital Ocean frontend team for making a website which was super easy to use even from mobile Firefox. (The website was not responsive or a complete redesign or anything, but it was compatible with mobile Firefox completely, and used standard HTTP elements which work well on all browsers anyway, rather than custom JavaScript-based monstrosities which attempt to validate input before it is submitted or use modals for input fields, and seldom work well on mobile browsers.)