iOS - Access Library

There are roughly two different methods for accessing iOS's Apple Books library. A (possibly-paid) third party application or manually mounting the device with macFUSE / ifuse.

Access via Third-party Applications

There are a number of third-party applications that grant access to an iOS device's filesystem. For the most part, they all expose the same directories, however, each might differ slightly in how they are represented in the GUI.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of paid software and the library's location within them:

iMazing - https://imazing.com

iMazing Seenshot

iExplorer - https://macroplant.com/iexplorer

iExplorer Screenshot

Access via macFUSE / ifuse

The free and open-source option requires a bit of work during installation but is effortless to run once complete.

Note that this has only been tested on Apple Silicon running macOS Ventura.

Requirements

  1. Install Homebrew. See here for installation instructions.

  2. Install macFUSE. See here for installation instructions as macFUSE requires enabling support for third party kernel extensions and will require a restart.

  3. Install ifuse

    brew install gromgit/fuse/ifuse-mac

    Running brew install ifuse is broken as of 2023-02-05.

Mount the Device

First we create a mount point. This can be anywhere and named anything.

mkdir /tmp/my-device

Mount a Single Device

If only a single device is connected, it can be mounted by simply running:

ifuse /tmp/my-device

Mount Multiple Devices

If there are multiple devices connected, a specific one can be mounted using its serial number. Assuming the device is an iPhone, run the following command:

system_profiler SPUSBDataType -detailLevel mini | grep -e iPhone -e Serial

Something similar to the following will print out. The 24-character string is the device's serial number.

iPhone:
  Serial Number: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
  Serial Number: 000000000000

To convert it to a UDID add a hyphen after the eight character.

XXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Finally, to mount the device, pass it to the command after the --udid flag to mount it:

ifuse /tmp/my-device --udid XXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Troubleshooting

ifuse might complain: Invalid device UDID specified, length needs to be 40 characters. Starting with the iPhone X, Apple changed UDIDs to use 24 bytes > and a dash (-) instead of the old 40-byte format.

If you get Failed to connect to lockdownd service on the device. Try again. If it still fails try rebooting your device. ensure that your device is connected, and isn't displaying a "Trust this computer" dialog. You'll need to approve that first. If you then get ERROR: Device 000000000000000000000000 returned unhandled error code -13 you'll need to disconnect and reconnect the device.

via https://reincubate.com/support/how-to/mount-iphone-files/

Sources