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  • Hacker News
  • I better not get more spam iMessages!!
    by dsalzman
  • Interesting project. If it actually works it opens up a ton of possibilities for testing and reverse engineering.
    by ironqcold
  • what is "PCC"?
    by orangea
  • 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...

    by busymom0
  • Is this safe?

    There are some binaries in scripts/resources that you need to run as root. No idea what's inside them.

    by discordance
  • Will Apple break this?
    by leoh
  • They will find a way to break it.
    by rvz
  • That's how all your cat-and-mouse games eventually end.
    by pino83
  • Can you use real Apple Wallet and ApplyPay (web) in the virtual device ? I've been struggling apple-pay test automation and simulators can't do the real apple-pay integration.
    by imshaikot
  • Is this what apple does in xcode?
    by boredatoms
  • 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.
    by vlovich123
  • 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!
    by thomc
  • 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!
    by chews
  • Will this project make it easier to performance test Apps on the virtual iPhone?
    by sumedh
  • 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

    by krackers
  • This seams neat, but I'm not sure I understand the purpose/difference between this and using the iOS simulator.
    by hamandcheese
  • 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.

    by ChrisMarshallNY
  • Here are some reasons to use this instead of the simulator: security research, testing, automation
    by zffr
  • 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
    by speedyapoc
  • 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.

    by dagmx
  • 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.
    by restes
  • > 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

    by root9876
  • I'm tired of Apple and its stupid rules, and its arrogant assumption that it is better than a democracy.
    by amelius
  • For Japan it might be the Felica chip.
    by rootnod3
  • 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`).
    by astafrig
  • 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...

    by benoau
  • 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

    by m132