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Apoorv Darshan
Apoorv Darshan

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Why Wi-Fi capture still works when the iPhone is locked

A detail worth its own post: TetherShot's Wi-Fi capture works even when the phone is locked.

That's because the cable-free path isn't screen mirroring. It opens a RemoteXPC tunnel to the device over your local network (using pymobiledevice3) and talks to the device service layer, so it doesn't depend on an unlocked, foregrounded screen the way a mirroring approach would. The capture comes back pixel-perfect.

Practically: you can leave a test iPhone on a shelf, locked, and still pull clean full-resolution screenshots of it from your Mac over Wi-Fi. No reaching for it, no waking it, no cable.

It's all local, device to Mac over your own network, with no servers in between. A native Swift 6 / SwiftUI menu-bar app for macOS 14+, open source under MIT.

https://github.com/apoorvdarshan/TetherShot

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