We need to talk about the iCopy-X.

We need to talk about the iCopy-X. It's been three years since it received an update.

Have the promises of the ultimate portable open-source Proxmark faded?

Is the product abandoned?

Is it still a must-have product for pentesters ?

We flew to China, sat down the the developers, and we have answers.

The iCopy-X was launched in 2021 as an automated RFID cloning tool specifically for "locksmiths, landlords and other professionals".

People quickly realised its potential for pentesters, RFID researchers and security auditors : a completely standalone, battery-powered, stable Proxmark 3. The screen, UI and buttons made previously complex tasks like "clone this unknown badge" quick and easy - but without sacrificing power: advanced users could connect via CLI directly to the Proxmark3 client.

This dual-usage meant that the iCopy-X was rapidly adopted as a "must-have tool" in the RFID community. The iCopy-X was never open-source, but the device was compelling, and the team promised "constant firmware upgrades", and the release of a "open-source development kit", to allow users to "modify logic" and "add new features to the graphical interface".

Five years later, however - these promises haven't been met. While the development team released minimum amounts of code to comply with the Proxmark's GPL licence - the UI, logic and processing layers remain closed source.

The gap between mainline Proxmark code, and iCopy-Xs' fork has increased; in 2022, Lab401 worked with iCopy-X to add LUA scripting into the UI - and that was the last update the device has received..

At Lab401, we have a few golden rules: make recommendations that customers can trust, and never disappoint customers. We've sold the iCopy-X as the ideal Proxmark device: convenience without sacrificing power. Throughout 2025, we've been asking ourselves the question: what's the status of the iCopy-X? Is the product abandoned? Can we honestly still recommend it as a must-have product for pentesters?

We flew to China to sit down with the developers - twice - and discuss the product and its future.

We'd planned to orient the conversation around how open-source would "save" the product, future-proof the product, and enable the product to evolve.
As we started discussed, we were honestly a little humbled: we'd missed a large part of the picture. We'd assumed that the iCopy-X's team had been ignoring _our_ problems, but we were also pretty ignorant of _their_ problems, notably:

 - The iCopy-X was built for locksmiths, not pentesters. And by and large, locksmiths are satisfied with the product. They also make up a significant portion of the sales; and the key markets are not the ones you'd expect.

 - The biggest risk for a manufacturer is investing in development, to have your market sniped by cloners. The iCopy-X has resisted cloners for more than 4 years: an impressive accomplishment, in no small part due to its closed-source policy.

However, the biggest surprise is that the team fully supports the idea Open Source - but there's an implementation problem.

The majority of the iCopy-X development was spent on refactoring the Proxmark codebase: making it drivable via UI, and more importantly: stable.
The Proxmark is a research device: pentesters can accept a few crashes or inconsistencies, plugging and unplugging and other quirkiness.
The iCopy-X is sold as a mainstream product: its target customers (locksmiths) need consistency and stability.

If you take the approach of putting mainline Proxmark firmware on the iCopy-X, you'll lose the UI, compatibility with the middleware that transports data between the Proxmark client and the UI, and the stability of the iCopy-X. These would have to be re-implemented.

If you go the other way, and take the iCopy-X code to the Proxmark codebase, aside from the backlog of years of commits to merge, you'll also be asking the Proxmark community to maintain two different hardware configurations - both seem unrealistic.

At this point, you may be scrambling to yell at us that we've missed something critical, that there's an easy solution, or actually the iCopy-X would be the perfect device, but it's just missing "whatever".

And that's great news, because that's the same conclusion we came to: let the community decide what needs to be done.
If you feel that the iCopy-X is missing features - tell us what they are.
If you feel that there's something super obvious that we missed: tell us what it is.
If you've got something to say and want to be heard by the iCopy-X developers: tell us.

The best place to leave comments is on the youtube video - but you can also send an email to support@lab401.com and we will collect the results.

Our goal is to collate the most popular missing features, fund development and get new updates pushed out. This has been pre-negociated with the iCopy-X team, and we believe not only achievable, but also realistic for all parties.

We acknowledge that "missing features" falls very short of releasing the full source code and let the community choose its own adventure - but while we're deeply invested in delivering customer satisfaction: the iCopy-X isn't our product, and everyone's interests, including the developers, need to be considered.

Now you know what's going on with the iCopy-X. Our goal is to start a dialog with everyone involved: the community, the contributors, the customers, the developers and the decision makers.

If you have an opinion on the iCopy-X, let it be known on the youtube video.

The iCopy-X dev team will be reading these comments - and if there are other interesting threads (reddit, etc) - please let it be known. We'll also be sending out emails to iCopy-X customers to get feedback.

So let us know - and until then - stay safe.