Tincan

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 and group messages from your desktop, mirror your phone's app notifications, and see real contact names — with calls 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.

🔗 tincanapp.uk

Status — working prototype

Messaging sends and receives today, live-tested against an iPhone over Bluetooth MAP:

• ✅ SMS — receive (with desktop notifications) and send from the GUI, delivered to the recipient's phone
• ✅ Group MMS — receive, send, and a dedicated group conversation view
• ✅ App notification mirroring (ANCS) — see notifications from phone apps on your desktop, with per-app filtering
• ✅ Message history — a local SQLite cache, so conversations persist across restarts
• ✅ Contact names (PBAP) — real names on conversations
• ✅ Desktop UX — conversation threads, dark mode, close-to-tray, clickable links, "Delivered ✓", color emoji on Wayland, one-click launch
• ✅ Internationalization — translatable UI (i18n pipeline)
• 🚧 In progress: contact avatars & search, conversation-dedup polish
• 🗺️ Planned: phone calls (HFP audio), packaging & distribution, an MCP API for agents — see the roadmap

Reference setup: iPhone (iOS 26.x) ↔ Fedora 44, BlueZ 5.86, PipeWire, PySide6, Python 3.14.

Architecture

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 messaging, ANCS notifications, and PBAP contacts via BlueZ/obexd today; HFP calls as they 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.

Running it

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_gui

On 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).

ANCS notifications require a fixed BlueZ. bluez ≤ 5.86 has a bug — the MGMT Add Extended Advertising Data command is built with the wrong struct size, so it's 8 bytes too long — that breaks all LE advertising on kernels which validate that command's length (Linux ≈ 7.0+, a security hardening). The symptom is RegisterAdvertisement failed … Invalid Parameters (0x0d) and ANCS never starts (messaging/MAP/PBAP are unaffected). Fixed in BlueZ by 2a6968b4 (advertising: Fix sending extra bytes with MGMT_OP_ADD_EXT_ADV_DATA, 2026-06-02) — in master, after 5.86 — so until your distro ships a release that includes it, apply the one-line patch. Full analysis + patch: docs/ancs-bluez-ext-adv-rootcause.md.

Phone calls (HFP) — in progress

Phone call audio requires oFono and a one-time WirePlumber backend switch.

1. Install oFono (Fedora 42+):

sudo dnf install ofono
sudo systemctl enable --now ofono

2. Switch WirePlumber to the oFono HFP backend (WirePlumber 0.5+):

mkdir -p ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/
cat > ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/50-hfp-ofono.conf << 'EOF'
monitor.bluez.properties = {
    bluez5.hfphsp-backend = "ofono"
}
EOF
systemctl --user restart wireplumber

Start order matters: oFono must start (or be restarted) after WirePlumber is in oFono mode. If you see "UUID already registered" in journalctl -u ofono, run sudo systemctl restart ofono once.

Development

pytest          # run the test suite (headless — offscreen Qt)
ruff check .    # lint

Documentation

• 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

Android?

Tincan's Bluetooth stack (MAP/ANCS/PBAP over BlueZ) works the same way in theory for an Android phone, but Android is a non-goal for this project. Android users should look at KDE Connect — a mature, well-supported Android ↔ Linux integration app available on Google Play and F-Droid.

Why

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.

Vibe-maintained

Tincan is a vibe-maintained project — the codebase is developed and maintained by autonomous AI coding agents working from a shared backlog. Human contributors set direction; agents implement, test, and ship.

Contributions are very welcome. You don't need to understand every line — open an issue or a PR and the agents will engage with it.

If you're curious about this development style, Steve Yegge's writing is a good primer:

• Vibe Maintainer — the piece this project takes its name from

License

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.