iPhone mirroring now working with voiceover on latest developer betas on iPhone and mac

Another annoying issue is when it randomly jumps to the status bar and I haven't figured out how to get out of it.
Additionally, scrolling is not consistent.

Well now we can somehow brows in safari there but the experience is so horrible. Has anyone noticed that (I guess) if you have caps lock as your VO modifier when caps lock of mac is on that of iphone announced by iphone voiceover there will be the opposite? It's a horrible experience compared to what sighted people have.

At this point I'm sure it's related, after quitting iphone when typing on the phone with voiceover with the virtual keyboard or BSI voiceover doesn't announce the character/word feedback. The only workarounds seems to reboot iphone. This impact messenger, imessage, but less whatsapp for a strange reason.

As far as I know phone link is windows. If so please don't confuse everyone? :)

Yes, this is software for Windows. It is technically on both Windows 10 and 11, but really the Windows 11 version is the only one worth noting. It does most, if not all, of what iPhone Mirroring is supposed to do on the macOS side of things. Including data sharing and using iPhone camera as Web camera, etc. Of course, Android gets a little more usability out of this over iPhone, but that’s not Microsoft’s fault, rather that’s a limitation by Apple. 🙂

Hi all, I'm glad to see that this works now, but is there any sort of guide for keyboard shortcuts to use it? I tried looking up VoiceOver keyboard commands on the iPhone but that doesn't seem to be working. For example, VO + H is supposed to go back to the home screen, and if I use that on a mac it just takes me to the VoiceOver help menu.

To return to the Home Screen, choose View > Home Screen (or press Command-1). Commands for App Switcher and Spotlight are also available in this menu, however I'm not sure how or if iOS-specific keyboard shortcuts work with iPhone Mirroring.

Thanks for the quick response. Command + 1 works. The command VO + Escape to go back doesn't seem to be working for me, at least it did not work in Audible. Also the toolbars of buttons at the bottoms of most apple apps, such as Mail and Safari, appear to be inaccessible. It can tell there's a toolbar but it thinks it's empty.
This is really shoddy work from Apple who usually gives us at least a passable accessibility solution. Why doesn't it just AirPlay VoiceOver's speech to the Mac and have you use the already implemented iOS keyboard controls for VoiceOver? They've already proven that VoiceOver can function over AirPlay with relatively low latency. I use as an example my Apple TV 4K First Gen from way back in 2017 and my set of second gen Homepods. VoiceOver works great when I have the Apple TV set to use the Homepods for audio, although sometimes it's a little touchy to get it working initially. But the latency is usable, and thus this should be achievable with iPhone Mirroring. It doesn't have to be perfect, but I would definitely expect it to work better than this, and I didn't expect some sloopy implementation of accessing the iPhone with the Mac's VoiceOver when iPhone Mirroring can just control and AirPlay the VoiceOver that's already designed to work well on the iPhone.

This is exactly I said to apple too. We want voiceover miroring in fact. If we pressure them (politely) enough they could do just that.

They have the resources to do it. I still fail to see why this wasn't thought of at first launch in beta, despite of everyone's excuses on the matter. Sounds like this was sloppally, put together. Not impressed by what I'm reading here. I'd get beta but I cannot believe this actually made into full production release.

I completely agree. I would expect this from most companies who always add accessibility as an afterthought, but I've learned to expect better from Apple. I'm sure it has happened before, but I can't think of a single important new feature that made it to official release without being somewhat accessible.

I wonder what the rationale for using VoiceOver on the Mac to interact with iOS is? How bad is the audio latency when streaming from the phone to the Mac? Perhaps that's why, though I'm certainly not intending to use this as an excuse for poor performance. How does Apple Watch mirroring work out of curiosity? Does it do the same thing, in which the iPhone version of VoiceOver reads content from the watch, rather than passing audio from the watch to the phone? Does this mean you can disable VoiceOver on the device being controlled, and continue accessing it from the controller? If that's the case, I can understand why they did that. Imagine if it worked that way to control another user's device using FaceTime Remote Control? Sadly, Apple Accessibility told me this feature isn't currently accessible with VO.

Hello,
is this feature available in whole globe? or in specific countries/continent? Asking because, after updating to 15.1, i still can't use it, in app i have only two buttons, app switcher and home screen, i press VO Space, goes to, say, home screen, but after that, i still can't see the apps.
Update: after installing iOs 18.1, it works. I hope the bugs will be resolved there, currently, if you want to scrole facebook, you basicly must fight with the thing.

Hello everyone,
Did anyone manage to move to the iPhone's status bar while mirroring? because I couldn't find a way to do it

Somewhere in the uper middle area, with trackpad. And it's not always consistent.

A while back, someone said, and I'm paraphrasing, that because apple was a trillion dollar company, that they should be able to hire as many engineers as they need to fix all the bugs. The post went on to explain why throwing more engineers at software development doesn't always work. And that is entirely true.

However, there are other ways that a company can improve software quality. Besides resources, software development has two other constraints: schedule and Features.

Schedule is easy to grasp. A company can forego product release until an acceptable level of quality has been achieved.

But if the schedule is fixed (which it appears to be at Apple), and resources are also fixed per the original comment on this topic, then the third constraint, features, has to give.

The company could throttle back their ambitions. By focusing on fewer features, they could improve quality of the remaining features.

If the company will not throttle back their ambitions, then quality must suffer. It's a natural consequence of an overconstrained situation.

I'll be the first person to admit that I've been quite critical of Apple's quality. Lately, though, my position has softened. We can buy high-tech consumer gadgets designed for sighted users that are accessible out of the box. That situation was unimaginable 20 years ago. I believe Apple deserves credit for that.

That being said, I continue to feel that Apple is disregarding a basic rule of thumb of software development. Developing a feature is 20% of the cost. Maintaining it is 80%. If a company continuously adds new features and fails to allow for their maintenance, those features will inevitably fall into disrepair, and eventually need to be replaced wholesale. In my opinion, this is a very expensive way to develop a product.

Has anyone been able to get iPhone Mirroring to work with WiFi disabled? Why should the underlying network connection matter? This one has me stumped.

There's a similar long-standing problem with SIRI. It can't know my location without WiFi enabled. It concerns me that the number of features requiring WiFi is growing rather than shrinking.

I can answer that I think. I don't know about IM and wifi but for location, I heard from various sources that location services use among other things approx location of access points / routers of network carrier.

I have noticed, in my personal collection of IOT devices, that more and more of said devices are requiring "same network compatibility", in order to communicate with one another. Perhaps that is what is going on here? 🤔

The reason Phone link needs Wifi is that it uses AirPlay for the sound and mirroring. It actually uses both. I think Bluetooth is what it uses for transmitting commands, but especially with devices moving to Wifi 6e and Wifi 7 Wifi is much higher bandwidth and lower latency. I don't think bluetooth is capable of transmitting all the data required by iPhone Mirroring.

My Mac is wired to my router. Perhaps it makes sense that, if the iPhone can only connect wirelessly, then the mirrored Mac must also be connected wirelessly? But if I'm not using AirPlay or other wireless features, it still seems like a wired Mac network connection should work.

Sorry I'm went off-topic with SIRI requiring WiFi to know location, but it's sort of the same issue. SIRI shouldn't care whether I have a wired connection or wireless. It's the same network. Yet this issue has been around for at least eight years according to this 2016 support topic

I can't speak to the Siri situation, but for iPhone Mirroring I don't believe it's going through your router. I think it does a Wifi direct connection to your phone. As I understand it this is also why AirPlay struggles between LAN connected devices more than those on Wifi. It uses the local network to find the devices and then they connect to each other directly. With modern Wifi you'll get a much lower latency connection that way than you would from your Mac going through LAN to your router and connecting wirelessly to your iPhone since it cuts out the middle man of your router.
For my own personal curiosity, why is this an issue for you? If your Mac is hardwired to ethernet it's also almost certainly connected to AC power so you're not conserving battery by turning off Wifi. If you leave it on your Mac will do things over Wifi that work better that way such as AirPlay, while using Ethernet for everything else.

Thanks. I did a little research. AirPlay and screen mirroring both use peer-to-peer connections. I didn't find any articles about what underlying technology iPhone Mirroring uses, but it seems logical that it would be the same.