Open-source iPhone-control lets AI agents drive a real iPhone

On November 6, 2026, a developer posted on V2EX about an open source tool called iPhone-control, aimed at letting an AI agent operate a physical iPhone from Linux. According to the post, the author had previously stitched together a setup using go-ios, pymobiledevice3 and WDA, but found that each piece needed separate installation and separate signing, and that tunnels kept dropping and required custom scripts to watch over them, so the whole thing was rewritten in Rust.

iPhone-control works with a single Rust binary built on idevice, Impactor and WebDriverAgent, with no need for Xcode, a paid developer account or jailbreaking. It exposes 15 MCP tools covering screenshots, taps, swipes, long-presses, text input (including Chinese), pressing physical keys, launching and closing apps, and opening links. The tool can read on-screen UI elements, so a model can simply say "open Settings" instead of guessing coordinates. Each operation returns the interface state after it completes, and multi-step sequences can be sent in a single batch. Screens whose elements cannot be read, such as games and maps, fall back to tapping coordinates from a screenshot.

The author reports that across three daily-use tasks, including model reasoning time, total duration dropped by 44% — for example, computing 12×34 fell from 58 seconds to 35 seconds. In a test of a match-3 game, one level was cleared in 16 moves with a three-star result. The tool also handles unattended operation: it auto-recovers from cable disconnects, phone reboots and WebDriverAgent crashes, renews the seven-day free Apple ID signing automatically, and raises alerts via Bark or Telegram. An optional auto-unlock feature can type in the passcode to unlock the device. Testing so far was done on an iPhone 15 Pro Max running iOS 27 and on an iPhone 12 mini, with support for other models and versions not yet confirmed. These claims come from the author alone, and no independent verification has appeared as of this writing.