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iProxy – poor man’s tethering

The iPhone – the always online device. What would be more natural than using it on the train as internet connection for your laptop!? Unfortunately that’s not really an option if you

  • don’t want to jailbreak your phone
  • aren’t using one of the “official” carriers
  • don’t want to pay extra
  • want to use iPhone OS 3.1 and up

The only viable solution: a proxy!

That’s exactly what the “Netshare” application was. But it has already been banned from the App Store for a long time. So I thought – I just write my own. A few hours later I was able to reach the internet through my iPhone via the “iProxy” app.

iProxy is not as convenient as the real tethering. The internet connection is a few clicks more away. But if you’ve got a developer certificate (or have a friend that has one) it certainly is cheaper than handing out the money to your favorite telco. Especially if you only need this connection only every now and then.

Now while I cannot make this app available to all the iPhone user out there through Apple, I do make it available as Open Source as of today. iProxy is released under the Apache license and freely available on github.

Enjoy!

20. January 2010 | , , , ,

  • Mike C
    Curious if you think that the iPad will be able to use the iProxy on an iPhone? I suppose if 1 iPhone can use iProxy on another iPhone that would be a good sign.
  • Joe, I'd say: let's wait until the iPad is out.
  • Joe
    This is a great solution for a laptop. However, with the announcement of the iPad I am interested in providing access to an iPad (or an iPod Touch), which cannot create/host an ad-hoc network. Would it be possible to include creating an ad-hoc network in this app?
  • Hey Pieter, yes - unfortunately iProxy needs to be running on the iPhone.
  • Pieter Lansbergen
    Works very well indeed, thank you.
    Just one silly question: does iProxy have to be alive (running) on the iPhone. I guess yes.

    Greetings from iProxy :-)
  • Jamshid
    Okay I'll give Firefox another try. FYI http://forum.skype.com/lofiversion/index.php/t6... claims Skype works with http proxies, along with http://davidtse916.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/a-s... claims Skype works with Authoxy (a proxy to a proxy?). Could a .pac (http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/automatic-...) tell Authoxy to use iProxy (SOCKS), then Skype will use Authoxy? Or for that trouble might as well make iProxy an http proxy?
  • Skype not working does not surprise me. It does some fancy thing it cannot do through a SOCKS proxy. But I can assure you Firefox works just fine. I was always testing with that one. Maybe give it another try.
  • Jamshid
    Thanks this is great! FYI I could not get Skype 2.8 (latest) to work through iProxy on my Snow Leopard macbook. If anyone knows how to make Skype on Mac work with iProxy please post a comment.

    According to this 2008 post Skype for Mac has never worked with SOCKS: http://ahren.org/code/bit/skype-mac-os-and-fire....

    Safari and Chrome work fine, they automatically use the Network => Proxies setting, but I could not get Firefox 3.5 to work even when setting Firefox => Preferences => Advanced => Settings to Manual / SOCKS5.
  • Seems like Firefox does not use the system settings. Go to Preferences > Adanced > Network > Settings to setup the proxy in there. You could use the Firefox profile manager to switch between the proxy/no proxy settings then.
  • Gerd
    Thanks, very good work. Works for me wirth Safari and Mail. And it's even working if you enable the VPN on iPhone, than you have a VPN connection with your Mac and access to the company mail e.g.

    Only drawback for mew is that I didn't get it up with Firefox on the Mac...

    Regards
    GG
  • Hey Randal, the point is that you don't need to jailbreak your phone to do it. When jailbreaking there are plenty of ways to connect your computer to the internet via iPhone.
  • Given that you still need to set up SOCKS, how is this any different from using the existing sshd server on your (jailbroken) phone, then ssh'ing in with a -L 9050 to set up a port 9050 local SOCKS?
  • You go boy! Stick it to the man!
  • Hey, Paul. Not sure I understand your question. Why one would want to analyze the packets? It's just a SOCKS5 proxy passing on the information.

    If you want to analyze try the USB protocol and make http://github.com/st3fan/usbmux-proxy working with 3.1.2 and iTunes9 again :)
  • Hello via iProxy! Thanks for the great app!
  • Paul
    Have you considered, or perhaps something like this already exists, but tunneling the iphone connection through your computer in an effort to analyze the packets with something like Wireshark? thanks.
  • Hi TC!

    Ich denke mal, du wirst schon schnell deinen fame abholen, wenn alle kräftig via twitter deine Kreation weiter tragen. ;) Gut so!
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