[_k2vp]

I built a bad clone of Charles Proxy over the summer as part of another project (iOS VPN -> mitm with custom root certificate -> logging). It's surprisingly simple. It basically goes App -> Packet tunnel -> SOCKS -> a child process (I used https://github.com/AdguardTeam/gomitmproxy) to handle the sniffing and reencryption.

Did post the source somewhere at some point but my git server got corrupted and I haven't gone and fixed it. https://github.com/acheong08/apple-corelocation-experiments/...

I wonder if AI is good enough to vibe code my horrible hacks into a full clone of Charles Proxy these days.

Annoying fact: Apple requires you to have a paid developer account to access the Packet Tunnel APIs. You can't even test it in XCode simulator because of how networking works in there. It's insane that I can't even develop for my own phone without paying an extra fee to Apple. The error message when you sideload without a paid account doesn't make it obvious at all and it took me a good day or two before realizing .

[le-mark]

> It's insane that I can't even develop for my own phone without paying an extra fee to Apple.

A Linux phone can’t come fast enough. Yes there is at least one, on ancient hardware. IMO a viable Linux phone requires hardware at most one generation old.

[well_ackshually]

That Linux phone is called Android. It runs plenty fine enough even without GApps (or with shims like microg), and the sheer amount of engineering needed to make baseline linux even usable as a phone system is over a dozen years away.

Android with binder is a strictly superior architecture that anything else that has come for strict isolation. As a bonus, it's battle tested, and latest Android phones just... run linux. You can have a shell and GTK if you so desire.

[balnaphone]

When you say "just... run linux", are you referring to termux, or something else ? How do you run a linux userspace in Android ?

[well_ackshually]

I mean a fully fledged regular debian

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/bringing-desktop-linux-...

https://source.android.com/docs/whatsnew/android-16-release#...

While this is mostly a KVM setup, there's nothing specific about Android that prevents a linux userspace from running in there. Each app is almost one already. Most of its core components have been integrated into linux's main repository (like binder), and AOSP isn't that far off from a regular Linux. Sure, zygote, user & power management are not exactly a standard install, but they're not that crazy either

[rendaw]

Okay, so suppose I want a linux and not an android phone, so I get an android phone, disable login password etc, and delete everything except "Linux Terminal" and put my linux there.

What sort of tradeoffs would I see? Performance? Battery life? Security (secure enclave access?)

[le-mark]

That’s all very convincing. For users who just want a Linux phone? Not there yet. Android or not.

[well_ackshually]

Aside from a misplaced obstination to have _Linux_ as the base for your phone with all the awful power management, high energy use, bad governors, terrible process isolation and fleeing security holes everywhere in a phone that most of the times contains access to your entire life, what does Linux give you that Android doesn't? Both are FOSS.

[aeonik]

I do a lot of work in similar areas here.

While vibe coding will get you something that potentially works, I've noticed LLMs are really bad at cleanly abstracting across multiple layers in this area. They usually will insist on parsing and serializing every field at every layer.

If you have the protocols/interfaces well defined up front it is very fast at building extensions, analytics or visualizations though.

[wwweston]

> I've noticed LLMs are really bad at cleanly abstracting across multiple layers

Which makes sense, as most developers are too (it’s a particular non-trivial skill and rarely modeled wrll), so LLMs are more likely to be trained on muddled multiple layers.

[jeroenhd]

mitmproxy/mitmweb offer a WireGuard server implementation to do pretty much this. You can grab any existing WireGuard VPN, scan a QR code to import the VPN config, and start monitoring (after installing the MITM certificate, of course).

The packet tunnel story is crazy. I'm glad Android allows you to just use network APIs without question as a developer.

[_lvbh]

That's what I usually use. The packet tunnel method is used if you want everything to be fully local. My plan was to make an app that can locally spoof your location on iOS without a third party able to MITM.