A Linux desktop phone companion for the iPhone — like Microsoft Phone Link, but open and for Linux. Tincan talks to an iPhone over standard Bluetooth profiles (no jailbreak, no Apple-ID risk), so you can send and receive SMS from your desktop, with notifications, calls, and contacts on the roadmap.
It's structured as a headless daemon + a thin GUI over a D-Bus bus, so other clients — including a future AI "secretary" agent (a separate project) — can drive the same capabilities.
The name: a tin-can telephone — a humble, honest string between two endpoints.
SMS send and receive work today, live-tested against an iPhone over Bluetooth MAP:
- ✅ Receive incoming SMS, with desktop notifications
- ✅ Send SMS from the GUI — delivered to the recipient's phone
- ✅ Conversation threads, dark mode, close-to-tray, clickable links
- 🚧 In progress: contact names & avatars (PBAP), conversation dedup, outbound-bubble polish
- 🗺️ Planned: full notification mirroring, calls, an MCP API — see the roadmap
Reference setup: iPhone (iOS 26.x) ↔ Fedora 44, BlueZ 5.86, PipeWire, PySide6, Python 3.14.
A headless bus (daemon) with thin clients:
iPhone ──Bluetooth (MAP / ANCS / HFP / PBAP)──▶ BlueZ / obexd ──▶ tincand ──D-Bus──▶ tincan_gui
im.tincan.Daemon (+ future clients)
tincand— headless daemon that owns the Bluetooth connection (OBEX MAP via BlueZ/obexd today; ANCS / HFP / PBAP as features land). Normalizes raw profile data into a clean domain model and exposes a D-Bus session service,im.tincan.Daemon.tincan_gui— a PySide6 (Qt) desktop app; a pure client of the daemon.
This repository is purely the UI + bus. The AI "secretary" agent that will consume it (Claude integration, call transcription, voice synthesis) lives in a separate project.
Prereqs: a paired iPhone with Bluetooth on, BlueZ + obexd, the system python3-gi and python3-dbus, plus the pip deps below.
pip install -r requirements.txt # PySide6, vobject
# 1. Start the daemon (use your iPhone's Bluetooth address)
PYTHONPATH=. python -m tincand --backend map --device AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF
# 2. Start the GUI
PYTHONPATH=. python -m tincan_guiOn first connect, iOS shows a "Show Notifications" consent prompt for the paired device — accept it on the phone, then reconnect (the MAP link requires it).
pytest # run the test suite (headless — offscreen Qt)
ruff check . # lint- docs/PLAN.md — vision, design principles, architecture, phased roadmap
- docs/PROTOCOLS.md — the Bluetooth profiles (ANCS, MAP, HFP, PBAP) and how iOS behaves
- docs/LIMITATIONS.md — honest "what it can and can't do"
- docs/TESTING.md — testing approach
Microsoft Phone Link already does calls + SMS + notifications + contacts over Bluetooth alone — on Windows. Nobody had assembled the same stack on Linux. That's the gap Tincan fills.
MIT © 2026 quad341.
Tincan depends on (does not bundle) PySide6 and PyGObject, which are LGPL; they are used unmodified via dynamic import, so Tincan's own code stays MIT. dbus-python (MIT) and vobject (Apache-2.0) round out the runtime dependencies.