@tool decorated iOS device control for Strands Agents & DevDuck.

Drive any USB-connected iPhone/iPad from an LLM — read syslog, launch apps, take screenshots, simulate location, drive UI (via WebDriverAgent), pull crash logs, capture pcap.

Backed by pymobiledevice3 — the canonical pure-Python replacement for libimobiledevice.

🔌 Use as an MCP server

Use strands-ios from Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Kiro, or any MCP client — the ios tool (device control, apps, screenshots, UI automation) becomes an MCP tool.

claude mcp add ios -- uvx strands-ios

Claude Desktop config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ios": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["strands-ios"]
    }
  }
}

Options:

strands-ios --http --port 8000   # HTTP mode, multi-client

Install

pip install strands-ios

Optional extras:

pip install 'strands-ios[ui]'      # facebook-wda for UI automation
pip install 'strands-ios[vision]'  # Pillow for image manipulation

Setup

1. Trust the computer on your iPhone (plug it in → "Trust This Computer")

2. Enable Developer Mode on iOS 16+ (Settings → Privacy & Security → Developer Mode)

3. For iOS 17+ developer services (DVT, screenshot, launch/kill), start a tunnel:

   sudo pymobiledevice3 remote tunneld
   

4. For UI automation (tap/swipe/type), install WebDriverAgent on the device and run it. Then export WDA_URL=http://localhost:8100 after port-forwarding (iproxy 8100 8100).

Quickstart

from strands import Agent
from strands_ios import ios

agent = Agent(tools=[ios])
agent("take a screenshot of my iphone and describe what's on screen")

DevDuck (1 line)

export DEVDUCK_TOOLS="strands_ios:ios;strands_tools:shell"
devduck "show me the last 50 lines of syslog from my iphone"

Actions

👁️ Vision

screenshot returns a proper Converse API image block — the agent actually sees the screen:

agent("screenshot my iphone and tell me if there are unread messages")
# → ios(action="screenshot") returns PNG bytes in Converse image block
# → vision model reads it → "You have 3 unread iMessages from..."

Env vars

Differences from strands-adb

iOS is not Android. Some honest trade-offs:

License

MIT