Category: Howto

With iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 Apple has added the ability to natively support external storage such as thumbdrives or SSDs on iPhone and iPad in Files.app. You might have to use a powered USB dongle* to use the Lightning port on older iPads. After Teymur asked what filesystems were supported on iPadOS/iOS 13, I decided to test some variations on 12.9″ iPad Pro (2018) with a SanDisk Ultra 64 GB Dual Drive running developer beta 2.

@holgr do you know if I need to use a specific fileformat for external ssds like a t5 on ipados?

— Teymur Madjderey (@Teymur) June 26, 2019

These filesystems are recognized as of iPadOS 13 developer beta 2:

👍 Mac OS Extended Journaled (MBR/GUID): read/write works
👍 Mac OS Extended Case-sensitive, Journaled (MBR/GUID): read/write works and properly supports case sensitive filenames

👍 APFS (GUID): read/write works
👍 APFS Case-sensitive (GUID): read/write works and properly supports case sensitive filenames

👍 MS-DOS FAT (MBR/GUID): read/write works
👍 exFAT (MBR/GUID): read/write works

These filesystems aren’t recognized, some of them don’t even result in an error and just silently fail as if there’s nothing connected:

👎 Mac OS Extended Encrypted, Journaled (GUID): you get an error message
👎 Mac OS Extended Encrypted, Case-sensitive, Journaled (GUID): you get an error message

👎 APFS Encrypted (GUID): silently fails, not detected
👎 APFS Encrypted, Case-sensitive (GUID): silently fails, not detected

👎 NTFS: you get an error message

This list might still change in future iOS/iPadOS 13 betas. For example APFS was added in beta 2, so there’s a little bit of hope that at least read support for NTFS and maybe even encrypted APFS/Mac OS Extended volumes might get added in upcoming betas. I have no idea how much work is necessary to add any sort of FileVault support and it might be just too late to make it into this year’s version of Apples operating systems for iPad and iPhone. It’d definitely be nice to be able to use encrypted drives between Mac and iPad, but the current state is already a giant step forward.

Update: These are the changes for iPadOS 13 beta 3.
👎 Mac OS Extended Encrypted, Journaled: silently fails, not detected
👎 Mac OS Extended Encrypted, Case-sensitive, Journaled: silently fails, not detected

tl;dr for beta 3: they removed some error messages and now the drive just doesn’t show up.

This article is meant to serve two purposes. Fist tell you – from beginning to end – how to turn a Raspberry Pi, the tiny computer running Raspbian, into a HomeKit camera, that you can access using Apple’s Home app. This works for live streams or just stills.

The second reason for this article is reminding me how specific pieces are done. I keep forgetting specifics because I simply don’t have to do some steps on a regular basis or there are tiny details that I’m not 100 percent sure of. I won’t go too deep into Linux specifics, there are other (and better) places to learn about using the command line.

Just leaving this here for my own sake, after having to deal with these annoying issues on the macOS Mojave Beta. When trying to build various Homebrew apps that use Python (or are Python) I ran into something like this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/bin/pip3", line 11, in
load_entry_point('pip==10.0.1', 'console_scripts', 'pip3')()
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 476, in load_entry_point
return get_distribution(dist).load_entry_point(group, name)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2700, in load_entry_point
return ep.load()
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2318, in load
return self.resolve()
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2324, in resolve
module = __import__(self.module_name, fromlist=['__name__'], level=0)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pip/_internal/__init__.py", line 20, in
from pip._vendor.urllib3.exceptions import DependencyWarning
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pip/_vendor/urllib3/__init__.py", line 8, in
from .connectionpool import (
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pip/_vendor/urllib3/connectionpool.py", line 36, in
from .response import HTTPResponse
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pip/_vendor/urllib3/response.py", line 3, in
import zlib
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'zlib'

The fix is as follows, thanks to sfdye over at GitHub:
$ brew update
# (Re)Install CLT (command in one line):
$ sudo installer -pkg /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/Packages/macOS_SDK_headers_for_macOS_10.14.pkg -target /

Then reinstall your Homebrew Python version with something like
$ brew reinstall python@2

That stopped these zlib errors for me.