Finally, local iOS virtualization without third-party hacks. Huge win for CI pipelines, though macOS host dependencies still limit scale.

> during iOS setup, don't pick Japan or the EU as your region (extra regulatory checks the VM can't satisfy)

I'm curious what are these checks

It will be to prevent access to third-party app stores as both the EU and Japan legislated they must be allowed.

> In a support document about alternative app marketplaces in the EU, Apple explained that “device eligibility for alternative app marketplaces is determined using on-device processing with only an indicator of eligibility sent to Apple.” In practice, iOS users in the EU who want to install alternative marketplaces will need to set the country or region of their Apple ID to an eligible country or region. Moreover, they will also need to be physically located in supported EU countries.

> In the case iOS users in the EU leave eligible regions, Apple will offer a “grace period” until apps downloaded from alternative app stores can no longer be updated. “If you’re gone for too long, you’ll lose access to some features, including installing new alternative app marketplaces. Apps you installed from alternative app marketplaces will continue to function, but they can’t be updated by the marketplace you downloaded it from,” the company explained.

https://www.thurrott.com/apple/298862/apple-adds-some-condit...

Wait so a third party app-store is allowed in the EU? I was not aware these even existed...

It is wild that Apple finds it cheaper to build and maintain different App store behaviors than to simplify and make alt app stores available in all markets. Other governments/markets don't care?

It's a very slow process, first there is investigations, then legislation, then enactment, then enforcement which is separately a very slow process. It requires a lot of willpower to get and keep the ball rolling and in fact nobody has even achieved the full extent of what they require yet! The EU may still be years away from meaningful compliance, Japan has only taken baby steps forming a new bureau just to enforce compliance of two companies widely accused of malicious compliance.

And then there is additional discouragement and pressure in the form of sanction and trade deal threats for regulating American tech platforms.

> And then there is additional discouragement and pressure in the form of sanction and trade deal threats for regulating American tech platforms.

What people don't realise is that local companies aren't just competing with each other, they're competing against the US military.

Who said it's cheaper?

There's an endless supply of bodies of water to be renamed.

Since 2024: https://www.macstories.net/news/altstore-is-now-available-in...

https://altstore.io

Any working way to spoof your locale to trick this into any form of usability?

You need to fake the cell towers and change your accounts billing address. It's not trivial.

I have never tried. I'm sure there are some reddit threads about this though.

In addition to the third-party installation capability mentioned by siblings, Japan also has a regional capability for reassigning the side button to a third-party voice assistant (`com.apple.developer.side-button-access.allow`).

For Japan it might be the Felica chip.

That would surprise me. I don't recall having to change my iPhone's region after moving to Japan. Transport IC cards in Apple Pay have "just worked".

I am vaguely aware that some phone manufacturers silently remove certain NFC hardware (or disable some driver) in order to avoid paying Sony patent fees. Apple doesn't seem to do that, though.

This seams neat, but I'm not sure I understand the purpose/difference between this and using the iOS simulator.

The iOS Simulator consists of (some of) the userspace components of iOS compiled to run on macOS. This would be a full iPhone image running as-is via virtualization.

That explains the difference, but what's the purpose?

The simulator doesn't have a camera. The android emulator allows to configure the camera and use a picture, it's very handy to test your qr/barcode reader without needing to use a physical device. Maybe this also allows to use an image as camera?

You cannot run Network Extensions on the simulator

You can test your application, game, website without a physical phone?

Can do that with the simulator too

Running on ported userspace components, with a shim, isn't the same as running on the OS in itself.

That really matters, sometimes.

But not the vast majority of the time.

(source: been coding iOS since pre-SDK iPhone OS 1.0)

Can you give some examples of where it matters? I'm genuinely curious.

Last I checked, VPN network extensions wouldn't run in the simulator.

Is the simulator faster than this? I would suspect so.

Spam. Click farms. Etc.

It would also make testing far easier. I got bit with something that failed on real life iPhones with language set to es_US that worked fine on the simulator.

oh. is this why icloud spam texts are running wild now

No, it’s just trivial to generate iCloud email addresses that won’t get picked up by spam filter.

If functional, you can download apps from the App Store, sign in to iCloud.. probably do a bunch of agentic stuff as if you had a real device

Looks like apple services compatibility is not currently supported for this [0]

[0] https://github.com/Lakr233/vphone-cli/discussions/175

Exactly. It means it cannot download apps from the App Store or use Apple services and Apple knows this deliberate limitation.

Here are some reasons to use this instead of the simulator: security research, testing, automation

Looks like this tool can provide a jailbroken environment for the latest iOS versions whereas one does not exist on iOS simulator or a real device

The simulator is a completely different OS. It may even still be using Intel.

I always figured that Apple never set up a true emulator (like what Android does), because they didn't want people exploring their OS with a debugger.

Incorrect. The iOS simulator is and always has been, simply iOS frameworks running fully natively on macOS. It’s best to think of it as an alternative window managers but the apps are native Mac processes. They can be seen and debugged via the terminal using top and ps and lldb alongside all other processes. They just present gui via the Simulator Mac app container.

They do not live in a VM and are certainly not emulated at an instruction set level. They are Mac apps.

Ah. That makes sense.

I would think that "Mac apps," means that they are, actually, a different OS (I actually already knew that, which was why I said what I said. The Intel thing was a spitball).

But one of the few joys geeks get, these days, is telling other geeks they are wrong, so I feel as if I’ve done my bit to make this a happier place.

Can this be used for account recovery?

Does this include a virtual baseband?

Is this what apple does in xcode?

If you’re talking about the simulator, no. That doesn’t virtualize - it literally just runs it locally on your machine. Less RAM overhead and CPU since it uses your normal instruction set and doesn’t run a separate kernel and userspace.

At least historically, it actually did run its own entire userspace, including daemons (all the way to launchd, IIRC), etc. All compiled for Intel, back in the day. Shared the kernel though.

Many of the nominally shared system pieces between Mac and iPhone (like Foundation) actually had many subtle compile-time differences.

so can this receive web push notifications?

Will there ever be a day where I could run this on a PC or something like it?

Probably not, but you can run it on a Mac today.

This project is really cool its a shame you have to disable or partial disable SIP which can break some things.

Yeah real shame that I know I could never run this on a corporate machine and only ever as a hobbyist.

Have corporate buy you a research Air that isn’t on the MDM.

That means you're working for the wrong companies ;-)

Interesting project. If it actually works it opens up a ton of possibilities for testing and reverse engineering.

What a release! Congrats to the builder, lots of great work done here and in IOS profiling in general has been done here recently. Corellium went research only and I lost the ability to actually profile my applications the way I'd like. I've got a fun thing over coffee in the morning!

Feels weird that after their attempts to shut down corellium they themselves shipped the necessary bits to allow this

https://github.com/wh1te4ever/super-tart-vphone-writeup

Will this project make it easier to performance test Apps on the virtual iPhone?

what is "PCC"?

Private cloud compute I think. I learnt about it today too from this reddit post which mentions how:

> At WWDC, Apple announced that starting in the 27.x versions of iOS, macOS, etc., devs would be able to call Private Cloud Compute directly from Swift with no additional API configuration. Presently, the only way to get free cloud inference is by joining the App Store Small Business Program.

https://www.reddit.com/r/appledevelopers/comments/1vztibh/re...

Will Apple break this?

They will find a way to break it.