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The article says that iOS doesn’t support CDC Ethernet adapters. But I’ve plugged just standard USB ethernet adapters into my phone and had them work.

Does iOS communicate with them using some other standard?

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yes - ASIX / realtek chipsets are whats in your generic dongle, the drivers for which are bundled in iOS. CDC ECM is not supported.

I found this out when using CAN bus to ethernet on iPhone

macOS definitely does not ship drivers for Realtek’s vendor protocol, and only supports them via ECM/NCM. Are you claiming iOS is the exact opposite?

Well macOS ships with something called AppleUSBRealtek8153Patcher (aka com.apple.driver.usb.realtek8153patcher). I'm not sure if this uses proprietary Realtek protocols, but it's pretty well known that this patcher does not work reliably on macOS. These days I only use Realtek 8156 on macOS (which uses NCM). And I just tested the 8156 on iOS; in fact this comment is transmitted by iOS to HN via a 8156 dongle.

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