Introducing KIO AFC

A KIO worker for accessing iOS devices through the Apple File Conduit service.

Dolphin file manager showing the directory contents of an iPhone. Folders include "Apps", "Books", "DCIM" (Camera), "Documents", "Downloads", and 8 more.
Dolphin browsing the contents of an attached iPhone

While there have been several projects like this for both KDE 4 and Frameworks 5, this one has been written on top of the latest KIO classes and will be officially part of the next KDE Gear release. It is now part of the kio-extras module, which also houses the Android counterpart for transferring files over the MTP protocol.

Thanks to prior work in Solid, KDE’s hardware abstraction Framework, an iPhone plugged in to the computer will be shown in the Disks & Devices applet and Dolphin’s Places sidebar like any other external storage medium. I also submitted a small fix to UPower so that the device’s name rather than vendor and type is shown in the battery applet.

It supports browsing both the general file system as well as documents shared by apps through the House Arrest API. If you’re like me and prefer cable over cloud and wireless, please give it a try and report any bugs you might encounter! You just need to build the solid and kio-extras modules and make sure libimobiledevice-dev (naming will vary depending on your Linux distro) package is installed. You can also grab a build with this feature enabled fresh from the latest KDE neon Unstable edition or SUSE Krypton starting today.

If you don’t have any iOS device, you can still support KDE development by donating! ;)

6 thoughts on “Introducing KIO AFC”

  1. Very nice, indeed! Definitely prefer cable over cloud. Is that feature already implemented in KDE Neon /do I have to activate something for it to work? Because everytime I plug my iPhone in only the camera folder is accessible…

    1. It’s not in a released version of KDE software yet. If you have KDE neon unstable (or whatever the one that packages git master), then you should get it through system updates for libkf5solid5 and kio-extras.

        1. Yes, the KDE Gears 23.04 will be released on 20 April, with a beta on 16 March.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *