When Apple announced macOS Sequoia at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, iPhone Mirroring was quickly highlighted as one of the most exciting new additions. This handy tool places a mockup of your iPhone onto your macOS desktop, allowing you to interact with your phone right on your Mac. But one of iPhone Mirroring’s best features was missing entirely, even though macOS Sequoia has only just launched – until now.
That’s because Apple added the ability to drag and drop files between your Mac and iPhone in the latest macOS Sequoia 15.1 and iOS 18.1 betas. This makes iPhone Mirroring much more capable and helps it realize the potential it showed off at WWDC.
Instead of relying on a cloud hosting service like Google Drive or Dropbox, you can now move a file from your Mac to your iPhone, or vice versa, saving you time and effort. This feature also works when your iPhone is locked and charging, meaning it can be across the room and still allow you to move files between your devices.
In some ways, it’s also a better alternative to Apple’s AirDrop feature. While AirDrop opens the file you’re sharing to your Apple device after it’s been transferred, iPhone Mirroring’s drag-and-drop functionality lets you move a file directly to a third-party app. Apple software chief Craig Federighi this demonstrated at WWDC by dragging a video file directly into a template in the Unfold app, demonstrating what kind of things are possible with this new feature.
To use iPhone Mirroring’s drag-and-drop functionality, you’ll need to download iOS 18.1 beta 5 on your iPhone and macOS Sequoia 15.1 beta 5 on your Mac. You can do this by creating a free Apple account on Apple’s website and then opting in to the relevant betas on your devices. Note that iPhone Mirroring is only available in the developer beta right now, but it should arrive in the public beta soon.
Once you’ve downloaded the betas, open the iPhone Mirroring app from your Mac’s Dock and follow the onscreen instructions to set it up. You’ll then be able to move files between your devices with ease. You can open an app like Photos in iPhone Mirroring on your Mac and drop a file there, or you can move something from your iPhone’s Files app to 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 were plenty of other things Apple announced at WWDC that haven’t yet appeared, most notably a flurry of Apple Intelligence features and updates to Siri. While many of these aren’t expected until next year, we hope that – as with iPhone Mirroring – the wait will be worth it.