Wow, this brings back memories. I hacked on this and other iPhone support on Linux back in the day, including on getting music sync support working, back when I

Wow, this brings back memories. I hacked on this and other iPhone support on Linux back in the day, including on getting music sync support working, back when I myself used an iPhone. At the time I wrote usbmuxd, which implements the sync (not tethering) part of the protocol. I can now say that I had a bit of behind the scenes help from an Apple engineer; his tips helped work out some corner cases that would've been quite hard to track down otherwise. This friend sadly passed away a few years ago. Unfortunately, Apple has always been (publicly) hostile to third party support for their devices. For example, they insist on "signing" music databases with algorithms based on their FairPlay DRM implementation, to stop non-iTunes software from syncing music to them. I reverse engineered one variant of this (which was based on a white-box AES implementation and a lot of obfuscated junk) but they kept changing the algorithm. This went into libgpod and libimobiledevice.