I’ve encountered a few bugs while testing a web app on an iPad Pro and iPhone 7 Plus that I can’t reproduce in any browser on Windows or Android. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a working method to remote debug Safari from Windows.
I tried using the RemoteDebug iOS WebKit Adapter, but no devices show up in either Chrome or VS Code — even though:
Web Inspector is enabled on Safari,
the devices are trusted and visible in iTunes,
and all required dependencies are installed.
The server starts without errors, but nothing appears in the debugger.
Older threads suggest support broke after iOS 11, but recent updates to the adapter claim compatibility with iOS 12.2+ (I’m testing on iOS 13.3).
Has anyone found a way to reliably debug on iPhone using a Windows machine? Or is buying a Mac the only viable option at this point?
I’ve been working in frontend for nearly a decade, and yeah, trying to debug on iPhone from Windows was one of the most frustrating parts early on. RemoteDebug seemed promising but never actually picked up my device, no matter how many times I retried the setup. What finally helped was switching to BrowserStack’s real device cloud. It doesn’t give you full Chrome DevTools-style debugging, but I could still debug on iPhone for layout shifts, touch responsiveness, and CSS quirks. And best of all, no Mac needed
I can totally relate, @macy-davis. I’ve been in mobile QA for about 5 years now, and I’ve been through the same loops. For me, after wasting days on RemoteDebug and other ‘almost working’ solutions, I ended up borrowing a teammate’s Mac to use Safari’s Web Inspector. Not ideal, but it let us debug on iPhone properly over USB. If you’re working in a team, pairing like that temporarily helps a lot. You catch those weird iOS-only bugs much faster, especially the ones that just won’t show up on emulators or device farms
Been building mobile-first apps for 6+ years, and yeah, debugging on iPhone without a Mac always felt like walking a tightrope. I also played around with Node proxies and even tried setting up a macOS VM for Safari’s DevTools, but newer iOS versions kept breaking everything. In the end, I caved and bought a second-hand Mac Mini off eBay. It’s been rock-solid for me ever since. If Safari support is important to your users, and you regularly need to debug on iPhone, honestly, having a physical Mac around is still the most consistent option long-term