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Emulating an iPhone in QEMU

(eshard.com)
268 points walterbell | 2 comments | 05 Apr 25 10:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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LorenDB ◴[05 Apr 25 14:48 UTC] No.43593922[source]▶
Here's a fun way that this project could be applied: Take a phone that has pretty good hardware support for postmarketOS. Install a bare bones pmOS image, plus this version of QEMU, and boot iOS on and Android phone. It probably would be possible to further customize QEMU to forward all the phone hardware (modem, Bluetooth, etc.) into the iOS VM.
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jchw ◴[05 Apr 25 15:13 UTC] No.43594092[source]▶
Very amusing idea, but:

> Take a phone that has pretty good hardware support for postmarketOS

The first problem with this is finding a phone with postmarketOS that can both use the camera and take phone calls properly. I'd settle for that without the iOS/Android emulation...

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1231231231e ◴[05 Apr 25 15:35 UTC] No.43594252[source]▶
Ah yes. It appears that nothing has changed in the last decade for the Android ROM community. Still the same experience as downloading a custom ROM from "XDA Developers" for your HTC phone in 2016 and then finding out that it can't make phone calls and is bugged beyond comprehension.
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mikae1 ◴[05 Apr 25 17:41 UTC] No.43595161[source]▶
> It appears that nothing has changed in the last decade for the Android ROM community.

The exception: GrapheneOS. I installed without hassle over USB via my web browser (!).

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1. jeroenhd ◴[05 Apr 25 18:37 UTC] No.43595626[source]▶
Pixels are well-supported in general. It helps that they're essentially Google's reference devices.

As for flashing over USB, any device can do that thanks to WebUSB. All a website needs to know are the device identifiers for ADB mode, recovery mode, and fastboot mode.

I'd say building an image capable of booting on the phone is much harder than altering the GrapheneOS installer to actually flash that image. The process is extremely similar for most devices.

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2. notpushkin ◴[06 Apr 25 04:44 UTC] No.43599006[source]▶
AFAIK GrapheneOS flashes everything from fastboot (i.e. no recovery step). Implementing adb sideload protocol shouldn’t be too tricky though.