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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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...
For Japan it might be the Felica chip.
This seams neat, but I'm not sure I understand the purpose/difference between this and using the iOS simulator.
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.
That explains the difference, but what's the purpose?
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?
You cannot run Network Extensions on the simulator
You can test your application, game, website without a physical phone?
Can do that with the simulator too
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)
Can you give some examples of where it matters? I'm genuinely curious.
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
Looks like apple services compatibility is not currently supported for this [0]
[0] https://github.com/Lakr233/vphone-cli/discussions/175
Spam. Click farms. Etc.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
This project is really cool its a shame you have to disable or partial disable SIP which can break some things.
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!
Feels weird that after their attempts to shut down corellium they themselves shipped the necessary bits to allow this
https://github.com/wh1te4ever/super-tart-vphone-writeup
Interesting project. If it actually works it opens up a ton of possibilities for testing and reverse engineering.
Is this what apple does in xcode?
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.
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.
so can this receive web push notifications?
Will Apple break this?
what is "PCC"?
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...