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Apoorv Darshan
Apoorv Darshan

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How TetherShot grabs a tethered iPhone with AVFoundation

The core trick behind TetherShot isn't a hack, it's a documented macOS capability most people never touch.

Connect a trusted iPhone over USB and macOS surfaces it as a muxed AVCaptureDevice, the same device class QuickTime uses for its 'New Movie Recording' iPhone source. Once you hold that device, you can pull frames at full native resolution through AVFoundation, no jailbreak, no private screen-grab APIs.

TetherShot turns that into a single menu-bar action: enumerate connected devices, capture the current frame at full res, write it to your destination folder with a timestamped filename, and copy it to the clipboard. Instant, zero setup once the cable is trusted.

The whole thing is native Swift 6 / SwiftUI, runs as a background menu-bar agent, and is open source under MIT if you want to read exactly how the capture path is wired.

macOS 14+, built and tested on macOS 26 Tahoe with iOS 26.

https://github.com/apoorvdarshan/TetherShot

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