Use expo on physical iPhone without wifi or lan

Expo Development Tools
1

Hi my router is broken, so I don’t have an option in wifi and can’t also use a Hotspot because the phone gets extremely hot and damaged its battery once during this process, in Android when you connect via USB it works perfectly and doesn’t need a router but on ios I couldn’t find a way to do so, any workarounds would be appreciated, thanks.

2

Hey @stevemoretz, Metro needs a local network to function so this won’t be possible unfortunately.

Cheers,
Adam

3

Thank so you much for the answer but why does it work for android then?

4

Android is able to make use of port forwarding via adb.

5

Thanks I always wondered how that works on Android.Look like I need a new router after all.

6

This is actually possible on macos, not tested on Linux or windows yet though.

I’m going to share more information if I get them working too.

7

@adamjnav

Hello adam I tested on mac and could connect iPhone and mac through a usb and get it working using the internet Sharing feature of mac os, my mac also wasn’t connected to internet but it worked.

Here’s the full explaination:

In short you just connect the iPhone, turn on internet sharing from preferences → sharing and that’s pretty much it, you get the ip using ifconfig and use :

export EXPO_DEVTOOLS_LISTEN_ADDRESS=ip
export REACT_NATIVE_PACKAGER_HOSTNAME=ip
expo start

I also asked if it was possible on linux and the guy who answered the first question mentioned :

Yes, it’s possible. On Linux you’ll for example need to install libimobiledevice to make it work.

So this is doable, just wanted to inform you to see if you think it’s a good idea to officially support this? This is the missing peace of expo cli.

8

2 questions @stevemoretz

  1. when running ifconfig, what am I looking for? And what format should the IP address be?
  2. if I export REACT_NATIVE_PACKAGER_HOSTNAME= with the new IP, what will happen to my original WiFi connection? Do I need to undo the IP address?