Auto iPhone Uploader

Finish a video on your Windows PC, write its title and captions once, and let your PC post it through the real social apps on your iPhone. Posting from the phone apps keeps the quality that platform websites and browser uploaders throw away; the 4K60 Native Ingest paper has the tests behind that.

Before you install: this app taps through social apps on your iPhone. SECURITY.md lists exactly what it does and never does on your phone and computer, and how to check a download was built from this repository by GitHub.

What it does

Export a finished video into a folder that syncs to the cloud. The app picks it up, checks the file is complete, and adds it to a review queue on your PC; the original is never moved or changed. If you run a local AI (Ollama), it drafts the title, description, tags and captions. You edit them and confirm the exact text for each platform. Then your PC drives your iPhone over the USB cable and posts through the real apps:

• YouTube Shorts: title, description and the first frame as the thumbnail, posted from the YouTube app on the channel you set. Detail rows YouTube hides from accessibility (Description, Paid promotion, AI use) are found on screen with Windows' built-in offline OCR.
• Instagram Reels: the clip goes through Meta's Edits app for a 4K export, then into Instagram with your caption and a first-frame cover. Instagram's own "Also share on" switches carry the post to Facebook and Threads in the same upload. If Instagram is on another of your signed-in accounts, the app switches to the right one through Instagram's account switcher first.
• TikTok: posted from the TikTok app with your caption.

Each video is either Post now (everything immediately, in order: YouTube, then Instagram with its crossposts, then TikTok) or Schedule (the next free posting time): the app enters the slot in YouTube's and Instagram's own schedulers and reads the date and time back. TikTok's phone app can't schedule, so Schedule leaves it to you: post it yourself or press Post now on TikTok. Posting times are set in Settings → Posting times: one to five a day (10 AM and 7 PM by default), in your PC's time zone or one you choose.

Around every run:

• Do Not Disturb is on while the phone posts, and turned back off afterwards if the app turned it on.
• Checks before the final tap: the signed-in account, the exact video file and size, free space on the phone, and the first frame as the cover, proven by screenshot. A run that cannot prove one of them stops before posting. A final tap that timed out is never retried, so there are no double posts.
• Receipts come back from the apps. In the hour after a final tap the app looks at Instagram and Threads a few times, read-only, and marks the post posted when the profile proves it: Instagram's post count and newest first-frame tile, the newest Threads post with your caption. Facebook, TikTok and YouTube you confirm with Posted or Scheduled in the editor after a look at your phone.
• A self-healing phone link. One supervisor owns the USB tunnel and the phone driver, presses Home when a playing video wedges the driver, restarts only what died, and recovers a stalled USB link by restarting Apple's USB service and resetting the phone's USB port, asking for a replug only when that fails (docs/phone-link-reliability.md).
• Cleans up after itself. Once Instagram confirms a post, the Edits project its 4K export left behind (often over a gigabyte) goes to Edits' Trash, where you can still restore it. Nothing is saved to Photos.
• A short first-run setup: five calm screens, one task each, that move on by themselves; light, dark or system theme.

Everything runs on your own PC. The editor is a page at http://127.0.0.1:4748 that only your computer can open. There is no account to create, no cloud service of ours, and no tracking.

Requirements and limits

• A Windows 10 or 11 PC and an iPhone on a USB cable. Plug the phone into a port on the CPU's own USB controller (usually a rear port), not a chipset port or a hub, keep it charged, and turn off USB selective suspend; the checklist shows each of these.
• Supported iPhones: Face ID models (iPhone X and newer) on iOS 17.4 or newer. iPhones with a Home button (iPhone 8, SE) aren't supported; the setup checklist says so if one is plugged in.
• Tested on an iPhone 16 Pro Max with iOS 26.7. The YouTube flow is covered on other screen sizes by tests (docs/size-independence-audit.md). App updates can move buttons; a run then stops instead of guessing.
• English app labels, and an English OCR language in Windows (installed with English Windows).
• A free Apple ID signs the phone driver for 7 days; the checklist counts it down and scripts\phone_resign.py renews it.
• Threads is not scheduled natively: a scheduled video leaves Threads for you and says so. Post now covers Threads through Instagram's crosspost.
• TikTok has no native scheduler on the tested account, so Schedule leaves it to you: post it yourself or press Post now on TikTok. The app never posts it at the slot, so your PC doesn't need to be on then.
• Schedule mode has been run on the reference phone up to the date and time read-back; a committed scheduled post has not been verified there yet (docs/native-scheduling.md).
• Videos are opened from the OneDrive app. Google Drive, Dropbox and iCloud Drive folders go through the iPhone Files app, which has not been run live.
• Your PC stays awake while the app works, and one phone action runs at a time.

docs/launch-checklist.md records what has been verified live on the reference phone, and how to check each item yourself.

What you need

• A Windows 10 or 11 PC with Python 3.11 or newer. When the Python installer asks, tick Add python.exe to PATH.

• ffmpeg, so that ffmpeg and ffprobe work in a terminal. Every video is fully decoded once before it is accepted.

• The Apple Devices app from the Microsoft Store (or iTunes), which gives Windows the USB driver for iPhones.

• An iPhone with a USB cable, plugged into a port on the PC itself, with Developer Mode on (Settings → Privacy & Security → Developer Mode).

• Sideloadly and an Apple ID to sign the WebDriverAgent driver with. A free Apple ID works; its signature lasts 7 days and the app tells you when to renew it.

• OneDrive on the PC and on the iPhone, signed in to the same account.

• The social apps you want to post to, installed and signed in on the iPhone, plus Meta's Edits app for Instagram.

• Optional: Ollama for suggested titles and captions, with the two models the app uses:

  winget install Ollama.Ollama
  ollama pull qwen2.5vl:7b
  ollama pull qwen3:14b

  The models run on your own PC; no text or video leaves it. Without Ollama you write the text yourself.

Install (Windows, about fifteen minutes)

Easiest: the installer. Download AutoiPhoneUploader-Setup-<version>.exe from the latest release and run it. It needs no Python and no administrator rights: it installs into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Auto iPhone Uploader with its own copy of Python, downloads the iPhone connector and the phone control app (each checked against a pinned SHA-256), adds Start menu and Desktop shortcuts and a start-at-sign-in entry, and offers to open the app. Then continue at step 3 below. The Start menu entry Auto iPhone Uploader setup (passcode, USB helper) saves your iPhone passcode at a hidden prompt and installs the USB recovery helper. Uninstalling (Settings → Apps) removes the app and keeps your .state folder.

The installer is not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC / unrecognized app" the first time. That is the honest state of a small open-source project, not a sign it was tampered with: click More info → Run anyway, after checking the download against SHA256SUMS.txt or with gh attestation verify (how). The installer is built by GitHub Actions from the tagged commit.

Alternative: the zip and a PowerShell command (you install Python 3.11 or newer yourself):

1. Download auto-iphone-uploader-<version>.zip from the latest release (check it was built by GitHub), unzip it somewhere you will keep it, open the folder, type powershell in the address bar and press Enter.

2. Paste one command:

   powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\install_windows.ps1

   It installs the Python packages, downloads the iPhone connector (go-ios 1.3.2) and the phone control app (WebDriverAgent 16.12.9), each checked against a pinned SHA-256, adds a Desktop shortcut and a start-at-sign-in entry, offers to save your iPhone passcode at a hidden prompt, and opens the app. Re-run it any time; finished steps are skipped. -CheckOnly only reports. docs/setup-windows.md explains every step.

3. Follow the app's first-run screens: Connect your iPhone → Let your PC control it → Pick your video folder → Check your apps → You're ready. Each screen shows one thing to do and moves on by itself when it's done.

The one step Apple doesn't let a script do: sign the control app with your own Apple ID in Sideloadly (drag wda\WebDriverAgent.ipa onto it, click Start, then trust your Apple ID on the iPhone under Settings → General → VPN & Device Management), then run python scripts\phone_resign.py. Apple's password prompts appear in Sideloadly, never in this app. A free Apple ID's signing lasts seven days; the app counts down and the same command renews it.

Tell the app which account each platform posts to in .state\accounts.json, for example {"youtube": "@your-channel", "instagram": "@you", "threads": "@you", "tiktok": "@you"}. Every run stops before posting if the signed-in account differs (Instagram switches to the right one by itself).

Extras (Settings → setup checklist): the USB recovery helper (recovers a stalled USB link without a replug; one administrator prompt, then an on-demand task that can only restart Apple's USB service and reset the iPhone's port, see docs/usb-recovery-helper.md), local AI captions with Ollama, and advice on USB ports and charging.

Prefer not to run the script? python -m pip install -r requirements.txt, then python launch_video_drop.py; fetch go-ios and the WebDriverAgent runner yourself and set GO_IOS_PATH and WDA_IPA in .env (.env.example lists every key).

Everyday use

1. Export a video into your watched folder. It appears in the Queue once the file has stopped changing for 30 seconds and decodes cleanly.
2. Select it, check the suggested title and hashtags, press Apply to all, and edit any platform's text.
3. Press Confirm details for each platform you want.
4. Leave it on Schedule (it takes the next free posting time) or choose Post now, then start the run.
5. Look at the post on your phone, then click Posted or Scheduled in the editor so the queue shows the truth.

The header shows your Unattended streak: how many Schedule-mode videos in a row reached every app without a hand fix. The goal is 20.

Where things are kept

Drafts, settings, the local database, the phone link's state, cover screenshots and the re-sign material live in the .state folder inside the app folder. Keep it if you move or update the app, and keep it private. Media files are read in place and never copied into the app. tools\go-ios\ and wda\ hold the two downloaded components; delete them and run the installer again to refetch.

docs/how-it-works.md covers the details: the watch folder, text rules per platform, the slot planner, receipts, the link supervisor and the phone scripts. Changes are listed in CHANGELOG.md.

Third-party software

The phone driver in video_drop/phone/ is copied from SideTap (MIT). The installer downloads go-ios (MIT) and the unsigned WebDriverAgent runner (BSD-3); you sign the latter yourself. The re-sign step runs pymobiledevice3 (GPL-3.0) as a separate process. License texts and details are in third_party/NOTICE.md.

Develop

python -m pip install -r requirements-test.txt
python -m pytest tests -q

The suite runs without a phone (tests/conftest.py pins the time zone and stubs the phone-link wait, so run it with pytest, not unittest). GitHub Actions runs it on Windows and Linux with Python 3.11 and 3.14, plus the installer's -CheckOnly mode on Windows. Live iPhone behavior is checked separately because CI has no phone or platform accounts. This repo is also taking over the video workflow from the author's earlier Homebase system; see MIGRATION.md.

MIT licensed; see LICENSE.

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