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Comment by TD-Linux | Hacker News Reader

Do you still have to use iTunes to transfer music to iPhones? Can't you just copy files over and use some other playback app on the iPhone? The author sounds makes it sound like they are "forced" to use iTunes.

(disclaimer: the newest Apple product I own was manufactured in 1983)

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There is no "copying files over" with iDevices. For a long time there was "gtkpod" / "libgpod" which reverse-engineered iPod protocol and database format to load songs on an iPod. But on later iPods it involved an extracted Apple signing key, and Apple issued (successful) DMCA takedowns on websites which provided these keys.

Most pages on the gtkpod website currently appear to be defunct, probably because it's been impractical to make it work with iPhones.

This is one of those simple things I was happiest about when I finally moved from iOS to Android. Look, it's an operating system which actually allows you to move any files you want back and forth like with any other external storage! What an amazing innovation! How did they do it?! It was like having handcuffs removed.

There are many other reasons, but this is probably my biggest issue with iOS (well, this and all the hours of my life iTunes wasted while I wrestled with it to attempt something simple, such as its constant, needlessly slow & complex updates). It's intentionally broken to inconvenience us in the hopes of making more money unethically. I shudder in revulsion.

Playlist sync is the #1 thing why I use iTunes on Windows for years now with Android phone. It's easy, seamless and works. Manually copying multiple GBs and keeping playlists on both devices seems asinine.

Sadly I haven't found a Linux replacement which syncs music like this, probably no one is interested in making that works since everything is cloud nowadays.

> Do you still have to use iTunes to transfer music to iPhones?

Don't use an iPhone myself, but if I did, I would try if KDE Connect on iOS supports file syncing over Wifi like it does on Android.

KDE Connect is Android-only, and even if there is an iOS version sometime I don't think it would ever be able to support file syncing like on Android due to Apple restrictions on filesystem access.

As far as I know, yes. If there's another way, they don't make it obvious.

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