A real iPhone controlled from Windows over USB, no Mac needed

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sidetap is a Python harness that lets Claude Code, or a person in a browser, see and control a real iPhone from a Windows PC over USB, with no Mac, no jailbreak and no paid Apple developer account. Claude Code can tap buttons by reading the phone's actual interface tree rather than using OCR, and send texts, with guardrails that refuse if the contact match looks ambiguous. There is also a live viewer at about 34 fps and a big red STOP button.

The part that almost killed the project: WebDriverAgent, sideloaded with a free Apple ID, installed but never started. The maker found that Sideloadly signs the outer app but leaves the nested .xctest runner unsigned, so iOS silently refuses to load it. The fix grabs the provisioning profile Sideloadly creates, which sits in a temp folder for a few hundred milliseconds, and re-signs everything locally with go-ios.