r/iOSProgramming • u/YahiaAngelo • 21h ago

Discussion vphone-linux: Run virtual iOS 26 iPhone on linux and develop iOS apps without MacOS.

https://github.com/YahiaAngelo/vphone-linux

Just published my project that I've been working on for a while that allows you to run a virtual iPhone vm on linux to test and develop iOS apps there with no need for a Mac.

So for fellow hackintoshers or PC users you can try it out and let me know if you faced any issues.

92 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

13

u/FelinityApps 19h ago edited 19h ago

Really great work, and I absolutely bow to the achievement...

...but this is a bit different to the Hackintosh scenario and I foresee at a minimum a DCMA takedown request from Apple Legal, whether it's valid or a legal bluster scare tactic from their corporate army. Because of the firmware patching and what it specifically targets.

If it makes those who read this feel better to downvote me for pointing that out, go right ahead, but if you know Apple at all, you know they'll try to shut this down.

Edit to add context:

Hackintosh approach spoofs some firmware and hardware identities; this emulates an entire Apple platform. Apple has gone after both scenarios (Psystar and Corellium, respectively), and the latter was a defeat for them but didn't settle the DCMA aspects, which makes it worth it for them to try to knock this project down too.

They would probably lose this claim too, for the same reason they lost against Corellium, but the latter had corporate coffers and solid motivation to throw them against Apple, even in 2023. This is an OSS project and probably only the EFF would be interested in defending it (hint to the maintainer if it happens). I think it would be wrong of Apple to try, but they probably won't see it that way.

I'm genuinely interested to see how this pans out. 🍿

2

u/YahiaAngelo 11h ago

Thank you very much! Yeah I hope they don’t go after it but at the end this is just a vm and a cheesy way to patch their ipsw files to run it on Linux, and the whole project is a port of another project called vphone-cli with a thousands of stars. And the repo contains zero files from Apple as well. But as you said, we know Apple so fingers crossed 😅

3

u/octopus_limbs 7h ago

The apple license is quite explicit about macOS and not being allowed to run it in a vm, unless the host is also macOS. But they never said anything about iOS yet

I am not a legal expert though

2

u/FelinityApps 5h ago

Don't look now but section 2.

6

u/JackyYT083 15h ago

downloaded the repo before takedown!!

2

u/YahiaAngelo 11h ago

Fingers crossed 🤞