Poki for Windows

Drive a real iPhone from a Windows PC through MCP: screenshots, the accessibility tree, OCR, taps, typing and swipes.
A community port of Poki, which targets macOS; in step with upstream main as of 2026-11-11 (f8439b5). Built and maintained by Chenyu Shi.

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Poki on macOS: poki.bot · upstream README

Same MCP server, same tools, same Rust bridge as Poki. What changes is how the PC reaches the phone, where state lives, which OCR engine reads the screen, and which tools are left out because they need Xcode. You only need a Mac if pymobiledevice3 cannot download the developer disk image for your iOS version.

This repository covers only the host-side MCP on Windows. If you want Poki running on the iPhone itself, upstream ships Poki Setup for Windows: download it from the Alpha release.

Let your agent install it

Paste this into Claude Code, Codex, or any agent that can run PowerShell:

Install https://github.com/scy7796/poki-for-windows following its root AGENTS.md, including the MCP skill, and stop whenever you need me to act.

AGENTS.md walks the agent through prerequisites, the build, starting the service, registering your MCP client, and pairing the iPhone. It stops and asks you for the parts only you can do on the phone: Trust This Computer, Developer Mode, UI Automation.

Install it yourself

You need Windows 11, Git, Node.js 24+, Python 3.11+, Rust (rustup), and the Apple Devices app from the Microsoft Store. ffmpeg is optional and only used for screen recording.

git clone https://github.com/scy7796/poki-for-windows.git
cd poki-for-windows
./bin/setup.ps1
python -m pip install --upgrade rapidocr onnxruntime-directml pymobiledevice3

Open the Apple Devices app (it runs the USB service on 127.0.0.1:27015), plug in the iPhone, unlock it and tap Trust. Then:

node bin/prepare-device.mjs      # checks Developer Mode, installs the developer disk image
npm start                        # keep this running
node bin/call.mjs list_devices   # in a second window

Register the server with your client, for example Claude Code:

claude mcp add --scope user poki-mcp -- node "$PWD\src\stdio.mjs"

The full walkthrough, Wi-Fi setup included, is in docs/windows.md.

What was tested

All numbers below come from one Windows 11 PC (Intel Core Ultra 9) and one iPhone 16 Pro Max (iPhone17,2) on iOS 27.0.1. A different phone, iOS version, or network will give different timings. They were measured on the v0.1.1 base, before the 2026-11-11 upstream sync, and have not been measured again since.

Where a 6.4 s tap goes: 1.7 s is the touch itself (opening the media session, a fixed one-second warm-up, the touch), and about 3.9 s is reading the screen before and after to confirm what changed. Pass verify: false to tap, tap_text, swipe, scroll or batch_commands to skip that check when you don't need it. The saving has not been timed on the phone yet.

From a real task log: setting up an iOS Shortcuts automation took 38 UI steps, and 30 went through. Of the 8 that failed, 3 were the service being restarted underneath the task, 2 were taps over Wi-Fi before the audio fix (a refused audio stream no longer fails the input), 1 was another app holding the microphone, 1 was a tap_text that gave up before OCR finished (its time limit has been fixed since), and 1 reported an error after the text had been typed.

Known limits

• Over Wi-Fi the five test taps were on a static title, so they prove delivery, not that a control reacted. A tap that changes the screen has not been timed over the network.
• Any input fails with CoreDevice error 9022 while another app on the phone holds the microphone (a call, a voice note, a voice assistant). Free the microphone and it works again.
• Poki's resident helper, which keeps one media session per device, listens on a Unix socket and does not build on Windows. Every input here opens its own session and waits one second.
• start_simulator, shut_down_simulator, build_and_run, download_app_container and open_url need Xcode and are not offered. Crash reports are listed but not symbolicated.
• The developer disk image comes from pymobiledevice3's downloader, or from a Mac whose Xcode matches the phone's iOS version (POKI_DDI_DIR).
• Not tested on macOS. This fork builds the bridge with the rustcrypto TLS backend on every platform.

Privacy

• The service listens on 127.0.0.1 only, and every request needs the token in %LOCALAPPDATA%\PokiMCP\mcp.json. That folder also holds the Wi-Fi pairing records and recent frames. Treat it like a password.
• Poki sends screenshots, screen text and the accessibility tree to your MCP client when the agent calls a tool. From there they go to whichever model your client uses, so anything on the phone screen, notifications and verification codes included, can reach that provider. Poki itself uploads them nowhere.
• Saved screenshots go to Pictures\Poki MCP unless a tool call names another path.
• Network use: setup downloads from GitHub, crates.io and npm; the first OCR run downloads its models from modelscope.cn; pymobiledevice3 downloads Apple's developer disk image. Once a day the service asks GitHub's API, without credentials, for this repository's latest release. Set POKI_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 to turn that off.

Relationship to Poki

Poki is written by Joseph Zhou (@openmys on X) and contributors; its site is poki.bot. This repository keeps Poki's history and its AGPL-3.0-only license, and adds the Windows port on top of v0.1.1. Poki's maintainers have no Windows machine to test on, so they asked for the port to live in its own repository. I (Chenyu Shi) wrote the port and maintain it here. The fix that is not Windows-specific went back upstream as JosssphZhou/poki#39.

Poki's own READMEs are kept as README.poki.md and its translations (README.poki.zh-CN.md and so on). The port's design notes are in docs/windows.md.

Problems that only happen on Windows belong here. Problems you can reproduce on a Mac belong upstream.

License

AGPL-3.0-only, like Poki; see LICENSE. Poki is Copyright (c) 2026 Joseph Zhou and contributors. The Windows port is Copyright (c) 2026 Chenyu Shi. Open-source dependencies keep their own licenses; see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.