You can now use Apple’s best iPhone Mirroring feature on your Mac and iPhone
Drag and drop finally lands
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WhenAppleannouncedmacOS Sequoiaat itsWorldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)in June, theiPhone Mirroringfeature quickly emerged as one of its most interesting new additions. This handy tool plonks a mockup of your iPhone onto your macOS desktop, letting you interact with your phone right on your Mac. Yet one of iPhone Mirroring’s best features has beentotally absent, despite macOS Sequoiajust launching– until now.
That’s because Apple has added the ability to drag and drop files between your Mac and your iPhone in the latest macOS Sequoia 15.1 andiOS 18.1 betas. That makes iPhone Mirroring far more capable and helps it live up to the potential it showed atWWDC.
Instead of having to rely on a cloud-hosting service likeGoogle DriveorDropbox, you can now move a file from your Mac onto your iPhone, or vice versa, saving you time and effort in the process. This feature also works when your iPhone is locked and charging, meaning it could be on the other side of the room and still enable you to move files between your devices.
In some ways, it’s also a superior alternative to using Apple’sAirDropfeature. While AirDrop opens the file that you share to your Apple device once it has transferred, iPhone Mirroring’s drag and drop functionality lets you move a file directly into a third-party app. Apple’s software chief Craig Federighidemonstrated thisat WWDC by dropping a video file straight into a template in the Unfold app, showing the kind of things that are achievable with this new feature.
To start using iPhone Mirroring’s drag and drop ability, you’ll need todownload iOS 18.1 beta 5on your iPhone andmacOS Sequoia 15.1 beta 5on your Mac, which can be done by creating a free Apple accounton Apple’s websiteand then opting in to the relevant betas on your devices. Note that iPhone Mirroring is only available in the developer beta for now, but it should launch in the public beta soon.
Once you’ve downloaded the betas, open the iPhone Mirroring app from your Mac’s Dock and follow the on-screen instructions to set it up. Then you will be able to start shifting files between your devices with consummate ease. You can open an app like Photos in iPhone Mirroring on your Mac and drop a file there, or move something from your iPhone’s Files app onto your Mac’s desktop. There’s a lot of flexibility in how you use iPhone Mirroring.
It’s good to see this long-awaited feature arrive in macOS, but there are still plenty of other things that Apple announced at WWDC that have yet to make an appearance, notably manyApple Intelligencefeatures andupdates to Siri. While many of thosearen’t expected to launch until next year, here’s hoping that – as with iPhone Mirroring – the wait is worth it.
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Alex Blake has been fooling around with computers since the early 1990s, and since that time he’s learned a thing or two about tech. No more than two things, though. That’s all his brain can hold. As well as TechRadar, Alex writes for iMore, Digital Trends and Creative Bloq, among others. He was previously commissioning editor at MacFormat magazine. That means he mostly covers the world of Apple and its latest products, but also Windows, computer peripherals, mobile apps, and much more beyond. When not writing, you can find him hiking the English countryside and gaming on his PC.
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