Free Download Libimobiledevice
Enriqueta Tehney
Linux enthusiasts were not amused about great but incompatible hardware like the iPhone 2G. As iTunes was not available for Linux libiphone was born. This became libimobiledevice with the goal to bring freedom and "allow penguins to talk to fruits".
There seems to have been a recent uptick in restore-related issues where users have needed a way to kick their device out of recovery mode from a Windows host. irecovery from the libimobiledevice suite has this capability but none of the available Windows executables, at least that I could find, were up-to-date with upstream. Moreover, many of the available sources were just collections of executables hosted on unofficial GitHub repos, which I wouldn't consider especially trustworthy.
You can download the executables and their dependencies from Once downloaded, extract the contents of the tarball to a directory and either run the executables as you would any other .exe or via the terminal. They have been built using GitHub actions and are in-line with upstream libimobiledevice as of 03/16/23.
Before proceeding with doing any acquisition of iOS devices we recommend installing libimobiledevice utilities. These utilities will become useful when extracting crash logs and generating iTunes backups. Because the utilities and its libraries are subject to frequent changes in response to new versions of iOS, you might want to consider compiling libimobiledevice utilities from sources. Otherwise, if available, you can try installing packages available in your distribution:
Unfortunately the standard packages in the Ubuntu repository for ideviceinstaller/libimobiledevice and it's dependency are at the moment useless because they are so heavily outdated (even for Ubuntu 20.04) that they do not work for iOS 13.x devices.
Therefore I am searching way to install to get the latest libimobiledevice version from Github, compile it, make a deb from it.The main problem is that libimobiledevice can't be updated without also updating it's dependencies:
I tried to connect an iPhone to my laptop. Reading the IOS wiki I installed libimobiledevice which comes with usbmuxd. After several tries I can't manage to connect with the Iphone device. So I decided to remove all packages installed for it that I will never use. Everything goes well untill I tried to remove the libimobiledevice package itself. Pacman return an error of dependencies:
Check /var/log/pacman.log for when libimobiledevice and usbmuxd were first installed which I suspect was when upower was installed and explicitly installing then just reinstalled the already installed packages. You could also check the install reason in the output of `pacman -Qi libimobiledevice usbmuxd `.
Its turns out that my version of libimobiledevice was corrupt as well as the dependencies. I fixed this by completely reinstalling libimobiledevice and its dependencies as well as removing all previous data stored by libimobiledevice.
Note that a number of other system components on a typical Arch desktop may be built against older libplist/libimobiledevice/libusbmuxd sonames (e. g. upower), so replacing those with -git versions may break your system. This, too, is a responsibility of an AUR user.
Download Source Package libimobiledevice:
- [libimobiledevice_1.2.1git20191129.9f79242-1build1.dsc]
- [libimobiledevice_1.2.1git20191129.9f79242.orig.tar.bz2]
- [libimobiledevice_1.2.1git20191129.9f79242-1build1.debian.tar.xz]
- Ubuntu Core Developers (Mail Archive)
Other Packages Related to libimobiledevice-dev
- depends
- recommends
- suggests
- enhances
- dep:libgcrypt20-dev LGPL Crypto library - development files
- dep:libglib2.0-dev Development files for the GLib library
- dep:libgnutls28-dev GNU TLS library - development files
- dep:libimobiledevice6 (= 1.2.1git20191129.9f79242-1build1) Library for communicating with iPhone and other Apple devices
- dep:libplist-dev Library for handling Apple binary and XML property lists - development files
- dep:libtasn1-6-dev Manage ASN.1 structures (development)
- dep:libusbmuxd-dev USB multiplexor daemon for iPhone and iPod Touch devices - devel Download libimobiledevice-dev Download for all available architectures ArchitecturePackage SizeInstalled SizeFiles amd6483.6 kB555.0 kB [list of files] arm6485.6 kB574.0 kB [list of files] armhf79.0 kB441.0 kB [list of files] i38693.1 kB521.0 kB [list of files] ppc64el100.6 kB669.0 kB [list of files] riscv64145.8 kB1,388.0 kB [list of files] s390x80.8 kB561.0 kB [list of files] This page is also available in the following languages: