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iOS on QEMU

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61–70 of 106 posts

Re: iOS on QEMU

#61
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a motivated individual can still accomplish it, there are multiple ways documented on the web if you google a little. its however not permissable, as you cannot buy apple software without agreeing to their licence, which disallows running it on anything but apple hardware. for private fun projects: possible for professional things: a very bad idea

It's fine for professional things, too. Just follow the 11th commandment and you'll be fine.

11th commandment? "Everything's ok as long as you don't get caught"?

Re: iOS on QEMU

#62
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually do this now, without emulation: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/cctools-port Zig are also working on it: https://zig.news/monthly/zig-monthly-august-2021-ios-support... The pioneer of software dictatorship will probably make this impossible or illegal as soon as it gains any traction though. And people will probably congratulate them for it in the name of "security".

As a “closed iOS” advocate, I personally believe the ability to do development outside of a macOS is a great idea. I’ve long wanted to make iOS apps, but I don’t have the money to shell out for a Mac. Yes, Hackintoshes are a thing, but you need certain hardware to do so, and even then, it’s still difficult (last I checked).

Actually it is easy to build Hackintoshes, even with AMD. Catalina is running stable with Apple ID and all the bells and whistles. In the past when Apple ignored updating Mac Pro Trashcan for several years, we have build a monstrous PC with Hackintosh to run FinalCut. Search for Open Core Catalina.

Re: iOS on QEMU

#63
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually do this now, without emulation: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/cctools-port Zig are also working on it: https://zig.news/monthly/zig-monthly-august-2021-ios-support... The pioneer of software dictatorship will probably make this impossible or illegal as soon as it gains any traction though. And people will probably congratulate them for it in the name of "security".

As a “closed iOS” advocate, I personally believe the ability to do development outside of a macOS is a great idea. I’ve long wanted to make iOS apps, but I don’t have the money to shell out for a Mac. Yes, Hackintoshes are a thing, but you need certain hardware to do so, and even then, it’s still difficult (last I checked).

I can appreciate if this is too much money for you, but I recently bought a 2014 macmini i7 16GB and 512SSD on ebay for $440 shipped to my door. I needed something that could handle bigsur for some app development, and that was the best $/effort solution I found. Add another ~60 for a usb switch and cables, and I can easily switch between my primary and mac.

In general, there's a pretty good second hand market for macminis, and if you shop around you can probably get something usable for under $350 shipped.

Re: iOS on QEMU

#64
post #61
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine for professional things, too. Just follow the 11th commandment and you'll be fine.

11th commandment? "Everything's ok as long as you don't get caught"?

There's no difference in the binaries built by Xcode running directly on Apple-branded hardware and Xcode running in a macOS VM in a generic (or perhaps metal, if nested virtualization isn't available) ec2 instance.

Re: iOS on QEMU

#65
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a “closed iOS” advocate, I personally believe the ability to do development outside of a macOS is a great idea. I’ve long wanted to make iOS apps, but I don’t have the money to shell out for a Mac. Yes, Hackintoshes are a thing, but you need certain hardware to do so, and even then, it’s still difficult (last I checked).

For casual app development I just run MacOS in a free VMWare instance on my Windows machine. It has no graphics acceleration but otherwise works flawlessly.

I did this with QEMU, the performance is pretty fantastic under Linux.

Re: iOS on QEMU

#66
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the number of people who have a Librem phone but want to run iOS on it is basically zero.

Wrong. There are people who would like hardware kill switches but are required to run either iOS or Android apps for work. With iOS in a VM, you could truly "log out of work" and shutdown that part of your phone when not needed without carrying a second work-specific device.

And they would not want to do that on a Librem phone. Librem phone is for the tiny subset of people who want a computer with a free BIOS as well as a fully-free Linux distro like PureOS.

Re: iOS on QEMU

#67
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also very easy to brake on apple's end.

Only for future releases. If it works currently for iOS 12, it'll keep working for those builds of iOS 12. I fail to see how Apple can break what already works for code they can't/won't change.

They have the power to disable your OS remotely for any reason. I think it's safe to say that ship has sailed.

Re: iOS on QEMU

#68
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days, unfortunately, it is not possible. Well, you can virtualize MacOs, but you can not connect iOS device to it, nor you can run a virtual iOS device inside it. Apple went out of its way to deliberately disable physical phones connecting to a virtual MacOS. Any other USB device can be connected, but not an iphone.

We have iPhones connecting to macOS VMs for our CI system and have never had any issues with it?

Well, may be I am unlucky one, but I just tried and freshly installed MacOS in VirtualBox VM can see any other USB device except iPhone XR. This setup used to work find a few years ago but stopped a at least on 2018. Will try VMWare.

Re: iOS on QEMU

#69
post #54
post #52

Repo looks a little stale to me? I wonder how similar this is to the Xcode Cloud beta QEMU used by Apple someone spotted https://twitter.com/khaost/status/1410332951963869185?lang=e...

Unrelated, that one was developed entirely by apple

curious how you know that

Re: iOS on QEMU

#70
I want to get Android or iOS on QEMU with USB passthrough so that I can isolate it and pass it its own modem. (say a Quectel modem via a miniPCIe to USB card)

Is this possible as it stands? At least in bits and pieces I can put together?

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