The developer notes that this is probably the first time someone has emulated the iPhone operating system using open source tools. There are some situations that cause the system to crash, but it’s still impressive to see a version of iOS being emulated on another platform. The system is completely navigable using a mouse and keyboard, and most pre-installed apps work just fine. But is it functional?ĭespite a few bugs, the final project seems quite functional, and iPhone OS 1.0 has been successfully emulated with QEMU – an open source virtualization platform. The project was discontinued long ago, but it allowed users to do things like install Android on the first generations of the iPhone and iPod touch. Interestingly, the project only became a reality thanks to OpeniBoot – an open source implementation of Apple’s bootloader. “Contemporary Apple devices contain many additional hardware components, such as neural engines, secure enclaves, and a variety of sensors that will make the emulation of such devices much more difficult and time consuming,” the developer explained.

This is why the developer chose to emulate the first build of the iPhone OS made for the iPod instead of the iPhone, since making the iPhone version work would require emulating even more components.Īt the same time, de Vos also chose iPhone OS 1.0 due to the fact that this version has much fewer security mechanisms than more recent versions of the operating system. In a blog post, de Vos explains that the tricky part was emulating the hardware components of the iPod touch. Martijn de Vos, also known as devos50, has used a lot of reverse engineering to emulate the very first version of the iPhone OS released for the first-generation iPod touch in 2007, after the iPhone was launched.The project took more than a year to work as the developer had to figure out how to simulate things like multitouch support and other hardware components. iPhone OS 1.0 emulated without iPhone hardware

One developer has successfully emulated the first version of the iPhone OS (remember that name?) on a computer using QEMU. But when it comes to iOS, pretty much no one has been able to run it on other platforms – at least until now. For years, people have been able to run macOS on non-Apple computers thanks to Hackintosh tools.

Ios emulator mac os