About
The Team
I’m Davide, the “team” behind every aspect of Partout.
What is Partout about?
Partout is a framework to build cross-platform tunnel apps, but aims at being a project whose library is just the foundational software component.
In a sense, Partout is a late spin-off of Passepartout, the comprehensive networking/privacy tool for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV.
Partout is a game changer in that:
- It opened the doors to non-Apple platforms
- It is much easier to deploy and use
- It is dramatically more stable and efficient
- It handles multiple protocols in a single service
- It is agnostic of crypto libraries (e.g. OpenSSL)
- It is not bound to VPN
Partout is available under the GPLv3.
Feel free to contact me for licensing or further information.
How Passepartout was born
It all started in 2017, when a former colleague at Private Internet Access sent me some Ruby snippets that would connect to an OpenVPN server. He would then ask me: “Could you port this to the iPhone?”.
Well, not only did I, but the guy left the company a few weeks later. I took care of the project alone for the next 7 years: that was TunnelKit. TunnelKit was the only stable OpenVPN implementation in native Swift/ObjC out there and, believe it or not, it is still relied on by millions of users, be it via my apps or providers like Hide.me, PIA, or ProtonVPN.
After leaving PIA, I then wondered why there were so many VPN providers doing the same over and over with different skins: an app with a VPN on/off toggle.
I came up with the idea of a single key that would open multiple doors, be it different protocols, providers, or platforms. That’s what the word Passepartout stands for in French, a master key, something that “passes everywhere”. It also refers to a term used in painting for a type of matting, which I learned about because my father was a painter.
Frustrated by the abandonment of OpenVPN Connect, I first published Passepartout in 2018 as an OpenVPN client for iOS based on TunnelKit.
From TunnelKit to Partout
Unfortunately, TunnelKit was not designed for the original concept of Passepartout, so the app ended up lagging behind its limitations. Beyond that, the library architecture was in general very primitive, tightly coupled to OpenVPN and OpenSSL, and hard to test.
That’s why I dedicated a relevant part of 2023/2024 to this completely new library, Partout, which today is the core of my project. The huge rewrite was worth the pain, a well-thought architecture that leverages the experience I gained with TunnelKit and WireGuardKit for OpenVPN and WireGuard connectivity.
Recently, I even ported the Swift codebase to Zig for increased performance, tiny footprint, and wide cross-platform support.
Through the years, Passepartout has become multiplatform, and WireGuard support was also added. As of August 2026, after establishing itself as a solid product for the Apple devices, Passepartout is almost ready to approach Android and Windows.