iMazing Blog

You might also be interested in a software called iMazing. It’s a paid piece of software, not free, but it’s worth the price imo. I use it mainly for transferring photos from my iPhone to my MacBook Pro M1. But I know that iMazing can back up WhatsApp messages as well, among other features. https://imazing.com/ https://imazing.com/guides/export-and-print-whatsapp-chats-from-iphone…

https://imazing.com/ Is worth a look if you want to backup export old messages.

For local backup, iMazing is great. It also does other useful things. It costs money though and you can decide whether that's a feature or bug. https://imazing.com/

https://imazing.com/ can do it, but yes, would be nice if it was built in photos and videos and notes you can bulk download from https://privacy.apple.com/ - like google takeout, takes several days before they mail you a link to the zip.

You can also do more granular backups with software like iMazing https://imazing.com/

I really like imazing[1]. It's not free, but I believe the trial version will pull photos for you. Runs on Windows/Mac. 1. https://imazing.com/

Not sure if this would help, but I recently learned about a product called iMazing[1] that lets you browse and edit iTunes backups. You can't access the whole filesystem of a running iDevice with it, but you can access the whole filesystem of the backup. So I suspect it might be possible for you to clean-up the backup offline & then restore it. (At a minimum it should enable you to extract the valuable contents out of the backup and manually restore it on top of a clean iOS install.) I've used it with some success to extract info from the photos database. I just wish they had a consumer-facing (read: more affordable/perpetually licensed) version of their CLI tool. [1]: https://imazing.com/

iMazing[0] can analyze an iTunes (or Finder in macOS Catalina and later) backup to determine whether Pegasus is present. [0] https://imazing.com/

> If I could run the Slack or Discord iOS apps on macOS I absolutely would, along with several other apps that have both Electron and iOS apps. To clarify the situation for any unaware readers, you can indeed run iOS/iPad apps on M1 Apple Silicon devices however not all. From memory, the policy was actually that everything was allowed to be installed by default with developers having to opt out of allowing users to install their iOS/iPad apps on macOS devices. There used to be workaround that may still work, but I haven't tried it in some time. You can use https://imazing.com (you'll just have to look past the marketing site for a minute...) to download apps you own as IPA files. Once you've got those, you can use the built-in macOS IPA installer to install those apps, even if developers have marketed them as not installable via the App Store. https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/18/21574207/how-to-install-run-any-ip… for a bit more info on the process

How is this different from iMazing? https://imazing.com/backup-iphone-ipad#:~:text=Choose%20iPhone%20backu…

That stops the computer asking, but it doesn't stop the phone asking. Apple changed this a few years ago, because of a potential security venerability: https://imazing.com/blog/ios-backup-passcode-prompt

I _think_ iMazing can do what you want: https://imazing.com/configurator Disclaimer: I've never used this feature. I only use it for backups and copying files to my iPhone.

Then you'll need a 3rd-party product. https://imazing.com/iphone-safari-history-bookmarks-reading-lists

Over the years, I've had success with both of these third-party apps on Macs and PCs to do exactly that: Transfer Music from iPhone, iPad, & iPod to your Mac or PC https://macroplant.com/iexplorer/tutorials/how-to-transfer-music-and-p… Transfer iPhone & iPod Music to your Computer or to iTunes https://imazing.com/iphone-music-transfer

Imazing Profile Editor works well to generate VPN profiles, and a lot of other profiles I don't use. Runs on Mac or Windows and it's free. No personal stake, just a satisfied user. https://imazing.com/profile-editor

Meanwhile, ever since my upgrade to iOS 16, I'm asked for my passcode every time I attempt an iTunes backup. This is apparently by design, in order to address a security vulnerability: https://imazing.com/blog/ios-backup-passcode-prompt But surely Apple could fix this more properly, however I guess they don't care to support people who make limited use of iCloud.

btw, you can copy movies and play them on vlc on your iphone by using itunes on windows or finder on mac. Just put them in the "file sharing" tab. Windows: https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare/images/en… Mac: https://imazing.com/uploads/screenshots/imazing/datasets/apps/vlc-tran…

iMazing supports same kind of scanning based on open source Mobile Verification Toolkit. Plus overall better backup management for iOS and iPadOS compared to iTunes even on free tier https://imazing.com/guides/detect-pegasus-and-other-spyware-on-iphone

I'm probably reading this HN thread from a Pegasus-infected iPhone right now, and I have no way of knowing! The only commercial solution to detect Pegasus I know of is iMazing's Pegasus detection tool[0] which borrows techniques from Amnesty International's Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT)[1] to detect Pegasus. Not sure how reliable it is though. Anyway with something like Pegasus, all the forensic artifacts would be random and heavily mutated for each infected device, so it's not as easy as running a tool to detect its presence. It apparently does anti-forensics under the hood. [0] https://imazing.com/blog/detecting-pegasus-spyware-with-imazing [1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2021/07/forensic-methodolog…

if you jailbreak your phone you can clear the keychain for an app. it also might be possible to use third party tools to tamper with the iphone backup. imazing has support for backup editing but i'm not sure if it allows you to change the local keychain: https://imazing.com/guides/how-to-edit-iphone-ipad-backup

Note that DoH (and DoT) shipped in iOS 14 and Big Sur, though aren't particularly easy to enable. You can use something like iMazing Profile Editor [1] to create a .mobileprofile (which is just XML) to configure DoH or DoT. [1]: https://imazing.com/profile-editor

Oh, I’m sorry for that. I wasn’t trying to be unhelpful or pedantic or obtuse. I hope it’s still helpful to another. I’ve used this to do other functions before, but not saving IPAs. https://imazing.com/guides/how-to-manage-apps-without-itunes

>I haven’t found any other way to copy photos from an iPhone into a laptop (unless you use macOS). iMazing does this, and is available for MacOS and Windows. https://imazing.com/guides/how-to-transfer-iphone-ipad-or-ipod-photos-…

Looks like you forgot to include the link to iMazing: https://imazing.com/store

There is an option on iOS that says TRANSFER TO MAC OR PC - Automatic - Keep Originals Automatically transfer photos and videos in a compatible format, or always transfer the original file without checking for compatibility. tl-dr; you can set it to automatic and when you backup via itunes the images will be jpegs Or use this free software https://imazing.com/heic

Most users on macOS aren't opening bundles. Even if that was part of the threat model, Apple doesn't encrypt bundle resources; only the binaries[0]. Before they got rid of iTunes, you actually used to be able to download IPAs through it to sync them onto your iPhone[1]. The IPA files were right on the drive and could be opened by anyone. The underlying interfaces to do this still exist and you can still get IPAs today using Apple Configurator 2, iMazing[2], or straight off the Apple CDN[3]. [0] https://forums.developer.apple.com/forums/thread/13486 This is also why you can't run iOS apps on unsigned macOS - the secure enclave will refuse to decrypt apps unless the currently booted OS is Apple-signed, with the usual integrity protections in place. [1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/298391/how-do-i-download-an-… [2] https://imazing.com/guides/how-to-manage-apps-without-itunes Also, shoutout to iMazing in general, it's a really useful tool for playing around with device backups. [3] I can't find the citation for this but I swear I saw a blog post that told you how to do this.