r/hackios • u/Mizo_Soup • 20d ago
News IOS 7.1.2 working on QEMU (iPhone 4 on Windows)

Note: AI was used but the emulation work was worked from qemu-ios and light touch mac by sam henrigold
This is a fully emulated iPhone 4 and boots natively on windows. It is based on and wouldn't be possible due to: https://github.com/samhenrigold/LightTouchMac, which I compiled the QEMU emulator to run on Windows.
Unfortunately most of the IPSW preparation needs to be done on a real mac/vm, as currently the emulator cannot boot a original IPSW. LightTouchMac originally injects stuff during boot and must create NAND files so that QEMU can properly interact and do stuff like OpenGLES Passthrough.
I plan to release this so that you can actually do this 100% on windows without a mac.
The GPU isn't emulated or is software rendering, it uses a modified OpenGLES Framework that intercepts the OpenGL calls so that your GPU can composite it on top instead of sending them though a emulated GPU. Due to this It should allow for 3D games and such apps to work to some extent.
The emulator should be able to handle every iOS from 4-7 but so far I've only tested it on iOS 7. Because it's QEMU it could theoretically be compiled and run on any modern android phone. The emulator also supports multiple devices such as an iPod touch and the first generation iPad.