iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU
32 comments
·June 12, 2025gnabgib
msgodel
Looking at the issue tracker it sounds like they've made significant progress since then.
walterbell
Progress update, https://eshard.com/posts/emulating-ios-14-with-qemu-part2
iOS emulated in QEMU with:
• Restore / Boot
• Software rendering
• Kernel and userspace debugging
• Pairing with the host
• Serial / SSH access
• Multitouch
• Network
• Install and run any arbitrary IPA
bri3d
The eShard thing and this GitHub are fairly different, as far as I know.
The eShard people found an earlier version of this repository and set about patching one billion parts of the iOS kernel, library cache, and userland to make it run on the limited emulator.
Meanwhile, the actual emulator has been advancing, arguably more quickly than the eShard patch set.
The current set of patches needed for the latest commits on this repo to run iOS are less than 10 instructions, all to enable the software-rendering/framebuffer fallback code path instead of trying to use display drivers.
https://github.com/ChefKissInc/QEMUAppleSilicon/wiki/Filesys...
throwaway48476
Presumably to build a exploit test framework.
hiimwavy
This is incredibly impressive—booting an iPhone 11 all the way to Springboard in QEMU is no small feat. Kudos to the ChefKissInc team and everyone who’s contributed to getting this far!
jeswin
This is the ultimate emulation hack bar none - congrats to everyone involved. This also bodes well for the hackintosh project. It's may no longer be a dead end (though miles away), and eventually we might even see efficient emulation as ARM PCs become generally available.
storus
ARM is not an open platform like IBM PC was. See Android phones and their custom Linux kernels with undocumented parts...
msgodel
Woah this sounds like it boots all the way to Springboard at least! That's pretty huge!
ewuhic
Does it support trollstore with ability to decrypt IPAs?
mywittyname
For the ignorant: what does this mean?
watusername
Just to expand a bit on the sibling comment, IPAs downloaded from the App Store are encrypted with a DRM scheme with a key tied to the Apple account. The binaries actually stay encrypted on-disk and the OS has facilities to transparently decrypt them when executed. The usual way of decrypting is to actually execute the app, attach a debugger (normally not possible for production apps) and read the decrypted code from memory.
tom1337
trollstore is an inofficial app store for iOS devices which does not require a jailbreak. There are also apps that seem to decrypt the encrypted IPA (which is the file format of an iOS app) so you can view the decrypted app code and the resources. it's kinda the same as decompiling a android java app.
skvmb
Came here to ask this very question. This would be killer if so!
xvilka
They should try to push it upstream, at least partially. Otherwise it's doomed to die like previous attempts.
tifa2up
Noob question: can you install iOS apps using this?
VMtest
There is still no proper documentation for using qemu on windows host, the options and arguments etc. We have to google and the info and ideas that are scattered across the internet, or referencing the Linux equivalents of it to come up with a solution
Liquix
to be fair most folks playing around with qemu are probably running unix. windows has plenty of user friendly virtualization options (virtualbox, vmware, hyper-v), not to mention WSL. so windows users would probably only run qemu in hyperspecific cases like this
VMtest
nope, not fair, virtualbox for example doesn't use whpx on windows while it has kvm backend on linux now
vmware is bloated, I prefer not to register an account to download it as well. hyper-v uses FreeRDP and that requires the guest distribution to support it AFAIK, so it's not a easy out-of-the-box solution
and I do use qemu on linux, just at the surface level, with libvirt with virt-manager, it's easy to configure with the UI
dd_xplore
Is it emulating iOS? Or only running iOS binaries? Why does it specifically say iPhone 11?
dadoum
It's emulating iPhone 11's hardware. It runs iOS 14 and sepOS (Apple Security Enclave's firmware) on top.
worldsavior
Probably because it's iPhone 11 binaries.
anthk
How does Qemu m68k work for Classic Mac BTW?
lioeters
It works. Technical discussions on running classic Macintosh with Qemu m68k:
Qemu-system-m68k to run Mac OS 7-8 - https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=37&sid=6a9...
LeoPanthera
Not great. Use Mini vMac instead.
PPC emulation works fine though.
seany
Seems like the important part would be emulating the security crap so it can be understood and bypassed. Where is this with that set of things? (being able to run things like banking/DMV emulated would be the killer feature)
Discussion on upstream repo (356 points, 2022, 144 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30545425
Related (mentions this repo): Emulating an iPhone in QEMU (268 points, 2 months ago, 64 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43592409