Juvenile marketing speech. "Free your software". You do not know what you are doing!
I hope Apple will close this door soon! It is in their own interest.
Of course, there will be a big row again, especially at MR, but that too will pass.
Never change a running system.
Apples iOS is the most secure, *because* it is not opened for user experiments.
Alternative: Go Android.
Or live in Windows and drill the iPhone with iMazing if you don't want to store a safe backup at Apple.
Security:
In case of doubt: Who dares to rebel against the FBI? Apple, but certainly not some little money-depending small company like Switzerland-iMazing.
Thank you for giving the opportunity to clear up a few misconceptions. You've obviously made your mind up, but learning about how things happen behind the scenes is never a bad thing.
Never change a running system.
iMazing does not change iOS. It does not install ANYTHING on your iPhone or iPad. It does not use unofficial communication channels with the phone. We back up iOS and iPadOS data in the exact same way Apple does, which is the only way since the OS itself builds the backup: you send a command to the device, it prepares the files, and sends them in a unique Apple backup format. Now, this format is unreadable, and we make it readable – we give you access to the backed up data, to a graphical representation of it, to export tools, and to the raw assets (photos, voicemail, message attachments etc...). And if you choose to encrypt your backup (which you should!), iOS itself does the encryption, not iMazing.
I hope Apple will close this door soon! It is in their own interest.
This 'door' is the ability to back up data locally and to sync without iCloud. The implications behind closing it are wide and perfectly unacceptable for many users, businesses and institutions included. Many government level institutions do not allow for data to be backed up in the cloud, at all. We work with state level and federal level institutions in the US, Canada, Germany, Italy... Many have a requirement to keep a copy of their mobile data locally. And the main use case isn't legal or investigative – it's about keeping accessible and actionable records of communications, files and data.
In another reply, you state:
iMazing is the tool kids use to try to manipulate Apple's settings.
Now, we do have backup editing tools which let users change files before restoring the backup. And yes, that's been used to tweak settings and do fun little hacks on games. But it's also used to save the day when the backup is corrupted and induces a boot loop (
https://imazing.com/blog/how-to-fix-ios-9-stuck-on-apple-logo-after-restoring-a-backup).
We've also helped people who couldn't back up at all because of APFS changes, when both iCloud and local backups would fail on iOS 10 for users who had filenames with special characters (including the Spanish ñ of piñata, shame on you for spelling that correctly!):
https://imazing.com/blog/ios-10-3-3-device-disconnected-error-during-backup-fix
It's an interesting read if you want to understand how deep bugs can go.
This stuff is made for people who don't trust Apple and like to be more clever, so it's something for juvenile morons.
We routinely see Apple engineers and geniuses turn to iMazing when things go south. We're a small passionate team of Apple fans, highly specialised in a way that no Apple tech support can be. We strive to enrich the Apple experience, not to pollute it or to weaken its security.
