Progress update, https://eshard.com/posts/emulating-ios-14-with-qemu-part2

  iOS emulated in QEMU with:

  • Restore / Boot
  • Software rendering
  • Kernel and userspace debugging
  • Pairing with the host
  • Serial / SSH access
  • Multitouch
  • Network
  • Install and run any arbitrary IPA

In other news, Cellebrite acquired Corellium iOS/Android virtualization for $170M, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44221982

Just to expand a bit on the sibling comment, IPAs downloaded from the App Store are encrypted with a DRM scheme with a key tied to the Apple account. The binaries actually stay encrypted on-disk and the OS has facilities to transparently decrypt them when executed. The usual way of decrypting is to actually execute the app, attach a debugger (normally not possible for production apps) and read the decrypted code from memory.

trollstore is an inofficial app store for iOS devices which does not require a jailbreak. There are also apps that seem to decrypt the encrypted IPA (which is the file format of an iOS app) so you can view the decrypted app code and the resources. it's kinda the same as decompiling a android java app.

nope, not fair, virtualbox for example doesn't use whpx on windows while it has kvm backend on linux now

vmware is bloated, I prefer not to register an account to download it as well. hyper-v uses FreeRDP and that requires the guest distribution to support it AFAIK, so it's not a easy out-of-the-box solution

and I do use qemu on linux, just at the surface level, with libvirt with virt-manager, it's easy to configure with the UI