[Georges Gagnerot] has been trying to emulate iOS and run iPhone software in a virtual environment. There were a few choices, and qemu-t8030 had a number of interesting features that you can check out in his post.

The project requires a patched QEMU, and [Georges] did some basic jailbreaking techniques. The real problem, of course, was not having the Apple Silicon GPU. Older versions of iOS let you select software rendering, but that option is gone on newer versions. However, it was possible to patch the phone to still use software rendering. There are still apps that directly use Metal or OpenGL that won’t run, but that’s another problem.

There is a plan to explore forwarding GPU calls to a real device. However, that seems difficult so it will have to wait for now.

That wasn’t the last problem, of course. But the post gives you a great view into the detective work. There is still work to go, but it looks like a lot of progress.

You can find the t8030 code on GitHub. Most of the iPhone hacking we see is hardware even if it means cutting the screen.

AI Picasso is a free mobile app which lets you generate AI images and art using Stable Diffusion. The app is free to use but is monetized by 10 second in-app ads which can be rather annoying. There are still a nice range of features and the image generation is relatively fast. Since there are […]

Source