Mounting iPhones and iPads in Ubuntu just works

Oct 17, 2014 09:49 GMT  ·  By

Apple products are known to behave very unfriendly when they are simply connected to a PC or Mac OS X and they usually require iTunes or some surrogate to transfer files. Fortunately, on Ubuntu things are a little bit different and they are mounted as drives.

Users who have Apple products know that you can't treat them the way you treat 99% of the rest of the devices, meaning you can't just plug them in and expect them to work. If you are on a Windows machine or even on a Mac OS X, you won't be able to see the folders and files on your device.

This is not an issue, or at least not a major one. On Windows and Mac OS X there is iTunes, and that software can be used to transfer all sorts of data. On Linux systems, the transfer can be handled by third-party applications. In Ubuntu for example, Rhythmbox can do this with no issue, but Ubuntu can also do another interesting thing. It can mount Apple devices as USB drives.

Mounting Apple products as USB drives sounds unlikely, but it works

To be fair, if you have an iPod and you have connected it to your Linux PC, you might have noticed that it shows up as a drive. It might not work on all the distros, but in Ubuntu and Arch Linux this wasn't an issue. The interesting thing is that Ubuntu (not Arch) is able to mount both the iPhone and the iPad in the same manner. This allows users to browse the folders on those devices and interact with the files, just like you would expect.

On Ubuntu, this interaction is possible with a handy library called imobiledevice, which is included by default. There were some problems a while ago with it and connecting Apple products didn't work, but it has been fixed. Now, every time you plug in an iPhone or an iPad, you have to approve the connection on your mobile device and everything should be fine.

There are some caveats though. The connection to those devices is not stable and it's rather finicky. It's possible that Nautilus will crash or that the mounting of the device is not successful. I noticed that the rate of success was greater for the iPhone than the one for the iPad, but they both work.

Also, this is not something unique to Ubuntu. This is a Linux system and if it can do it with a simple library, then other distros should have no problem.