Support localhost as URL in iOS Safari to connect to the desktop server

[SuperPat45]

Chrome debugger have a very cool thing:

When the chrome desktop is connected to an android smartphone,
we can use localhost as URL in the android chrome browser like:
http://localhost:8080
to connect to the desktop server (where the smartphone is connected in USB) instead of using the real IP of the desktop.

The big advantage of this technique is that the site is considered secure even when we don't use the https protocol.
Which allow to test API like serviceworker, geolocation, mediarecorder...
(window.isSecureContext === true)

With this, we can also copy/paste localhost URL's to the inspect.dev url bar directly.

Would it be possible to do the same thing on Safari iOS when indepect.dev is connected?

[auchenberg]

Thanks for this request @SuperPat45!

Right now we are dependent on the APIs exposed from Apple, and to enable this we would need some port mapping features and access to the networking stack – which we don't have.

For now our recommendation is to use https://ngrok.com/ or similar.

We absolutely want to land this, once possible.

[auchenberg]

Current reality (August 2026): Chrome's Android behavior comes from ADB reverse port forwarding, which is an OS-level USB networking feature rather than a DevTools protocol feature. Apple's iOS Web Inspector transport gives Inspect a debugging channel to Safari and WebViews, but it does not expose a supported reverse TCP port-mapping API that can make localhost on the phone resolve to a server on the desktop. Inspect therefore cannot implement the requested behavior faithfully on its own today. A narrower HTTP interception bridge could be researched, but it would not be equivalent: it would not transparently cover WebSockets, streaming, arbitrary TCP traffic, or all service-worker and secure-context behavior. The practical workaround remains an HTTPS tunnel or another network-reachable HTTPS development URL. Keeping this open as an upstream tracking request; the upstream label reflects that a complete solution depends on Apple exposing a supported device-to-host forwarding primitive.