3 hours ago
Note that, unlike Corellium, this isn't about emulating an iPhone. Apple is providing an iOS kernel for Virtualization.framework in PCC/cloudOS images and this project pairs it with the iOS user-space and patches to make everything run. Applications can very easily tell it apart from the real thing.
More details here: https://github.com/wh1te4ever/super-tart-vphone-writeup
11 hours ago
> 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
10 hours ago
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...
9 hours ago
Wait so a third party app-store is allowed in the EU? I was not aware these even existed...
8 hours ago
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?
8 hours ago
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.
7 hours ago
> 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.
7 hours ago
Who said it's cheaper?
8 hours ago
"Other governments/markets don't care?"
its the least of their problems
9 hours ago
7 hours ago
Any working way to spoof your locale to trick this into any form of usability?
7 hours ago
You need to fake the cell towers and change your accounts billing address. It's not trivial.
7 hours ago
I have never tried. I'm sure there are some reddit threads about this though.
30 minutes ago
It’s like a cookie banner. Absolutely useless initiative.
19 minutes ago
As someone using AltStore PAL to install some third-party apps that would never be allowed on the App Store (such as emulators and manga readers), I heavily disagree.
9 hours ago
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`).
5 hours ago
I also found out the Chinese version has the ability to block an app for accessing both mobile data and Wifi/WLAN data.
All other versions only allow denying mobile data to an app, not Wifi.
I really wish there was a way to enable this feature.
32 minutes ago
Xiaomi phones support it in all regions. Think about it, a company famous for putting ads in system apps has the feature but "privacy conscious" Apple literally put in extra work to disable it everywhere it's not legally required.
3 hours ago
This is a strong indicator that Apple's privacy claims are little more than a virtue signal. Network sandboxing an app is arguably the strongest privacy protection measure possible.
2 hours ago
I'm tired of Apple and its stupid rules, and its arrogant assumption that it is better than a democracy.
10 hours ago
For Japan it might be the Felica chip.
8 hours ago
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.
3 hours ago
There were iPhones with Japan-specific hardware for transit cards in the past but as of a couple years ago, all iPhones have been compatible.
11 hours ago
This seams neat, but I'm not sure I understand the purpose/difference between this and using the iOS simulator.
11 hours ago
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.
10 hours ago
That explains the difference, but what's the purpose?
9 hours ago
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?
5 hours ago
It's useful for security research since you can do kernel debugging and inspection of the device not possible in the simulator.
As others pointed out it's also useful for e.g. click/spam farms which need a "real" iPhone.
9 hours ago
You cannot run Network Extensions on the simulator
10 hours ago
You can test your application, game, website without a physical phone?
10 hours ago
Can do that with the simulator too
5 hours ago
I have had instances where the app runs fine on the simulator but crashes on the device. This might solve that.
10 hours ago
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)
9 hours ago
Can you give some examples of where it matters? I'm genuinely curious.
2 hours ago
It’s been years but I ran into a problem with a notification extension years ago. Worked fine on simulator, not on device. Turned out it was because I was using a HEIF image and (I think) the on-device extension was trying to use hardware decoding and didn’t have access to it. Meanwhile the simulator had no such sandboxing restrictions.
The difference doesn’t matter until it does, and then it’s infuriating to work out what’s going on.
9 hours ago
Last I checked, VPN network extensions wouldn't run in the simulator.
9 hours ago
Is the simulator faster than this? I would suspect so.
10 hours ago
Spam. Click farms. Etc.
10 hours ago
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.
7 hours ago
oh. is this why icloud spam texts are running wild now
7 hours ago
No, it’s just trivial to generate iCloud email addresses that won’t get picked up by spam filter.
10 hours ago
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
10 hours ago
Looks like apple services compatibility is not currently supported for this [0]
6 hours ago
If you read a bit further, there's a jailbroken variant that has Sileo and Trollstore installed, so you can run whatever IPAs
2 hours ago
Where?
Edit: ah now I see, in the main readme under heading Firmware Variants. https://github.com/Lakr233/vphone-cli#firmware-variants
8 hours ago
Exactly. It means it cannot download apps from the App Store or use Apple services and Apple knows this deliberate limitation.
7 hours ago
The simulator is a different SDK target than iOS itself.
You have to compile completely independently for it, and depending on your dependencies they may not compile for the simulator.
Additionally the simulator runs a really ancient and feature restricted version of Metal. That means you can’t test a lot of graphical things that the hardware actually supports. I’m not sure if this supports GPU passthrough but the macOS VMs do, so that alone would be a huge improvement if possible.
8 hours ago
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
7 hours ago
Here are some reasons to use this instead of the simulator: security research, testing, automation
9 hours ago
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.
9 hours ago
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.
9 hours ago
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.
an hour ago
Fantastic project, I use it regularly to test apps and there is a vphone-mcp which allows agents to control it, take screenshots and navigate the UI!
12 hours ago
Is this what apple does in xcode?
12 hours ago
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.
12 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
so can this receive web push notifications?
8 hours ago
Does this include a virtual baseband?
6 hours ago
No, only virtual GarageBand
6 hours ago
Can this be used to test the phone's browser on localhost?
2 hours ago
This is virtualization, so localhost will just be the virtual iphone itself. But you should have some command of how hosts are resolved, so you can always point the browser to the device hosting what you want to test, no?
Even easier, of course, is just using the iOS simulator included with xcode, which runs on your host computer. There, localhost resolves to your host computer.
11 hours ago
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!
10 hours ago
Feels weird that after their attempts to shut down corellium they themselves shipped the necessary bits to allow this
9 hours ago
Will this project make it easier to performance test Apps on the virtual iPhone?
2 hours ago
Ya totally, it's real hardware.... I mean, the PCC machines are actually m5's but ya.
11 hours ago
This project is really cool its a shame you have to disable or partial disable SIP which can break some things.
9 hours ago
Yeah real shame that I know I could never run this on a corporate machine and only ever as a hobbyist.
7 hours ago
Have corporate buy you a research Air that isn’t on the MDM.
6 hours ago
If corporate wants they can still accept/trust a machine with partially disabled SIP on the MDM
8 hours ago
That means you're working for the wrong companies ;-)
9 hours ago
Will there ever be a day where I could run this on a PC or something like it?
7 hours ago
Probably not, but you can run it on a Mac today.
12 hours ago
Interesting project. If it actually works it opens up a ton of possibilities for testing and reverse engineering.
10 hours ago
Will Apple break this?
8 hours ago
They will find a way to break it.
7 hours ago
Can this be used for account recovery?
12 hours ago
what is "PCC"?
12 hours ago
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...