How to enable remote debugging for recent iOS versions?

[nisargjhaveri]

I want to be able to share a device connected to a local machine (any OS) and make it available on a remote Mac machine for debugging using Xcode or any other tools.

This used to be possible by simply forwarding the usbmuxd socket on remote Mac machine such that it /var/run/usbmuxd connects to the local uxbmuxd socket. With the recent changes in communication protocol, this is no longer sufficient for the remote machine to detect locally connected devices.

Looking for suggestions on how to achieve this setup for iOS 17+? One key requirement is that, on the remote Mac machine, other processes (e.g. Xcode) should be able to detect and work on the device.

This is not strictly related to pymobiledevice3, but asking here as there is a lot of knowledge and implementation of internals here.

[doronz88]

usbmuxd isn't responsible for RemoteXPC communication. For that you'll need to forward remoted connections instead. Probably the best way to do something like that will be using tunneld instead.

[nisargjhaveri]

Okay.. Would forwarding the remoted bonjour service help or something else needs to be done? Can the remote Mac pair and connect with just the remoted bonjour service of the device forwarded?

Can you explain some more on tunneld? Can Xcode or other application connect and use the tunnel created with tunneld?

[doronz88]

In general, over bonjour you can discover the device, but bonjour is sent over multicast so you'll need to be on the same subnet as the device for it to work. If you can create a VPN to the same device LAN you win.
Otherwise, you'll have to forward each step: bonjour & RSD ports