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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: 0.746s | source
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candiddevmike ◴[05 Apr 25 15:04 UTC] No.43594028[source]▶
What would it take for Apple to embrace multiplatform iOS development?
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loungin ◴[05 Apr 25 15:11 UTC] No.43594074[source]▶
Apple will never consider doing that. Their actions speak to the exact opposite: total control of their devices and ecosystem, non-cooperation with other companies on standards, stringent app store controls. They gain nothing, in their eyes, to allow that development model.
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cosmic_cheese ◴[05 Apr 25 20:00 UTC] No.43596374[source]▶
Even if they did it would take a tour de force to make reality. The whole iOS development stack very heavily depends on macOS — Xcode is written in Objective-C/Swift + AppKit for example and the iOS Simulator just runs the iOS userland in a phone frame and lets macOS furnish the Darwin half.

Practically speaking, they’d at minimum have to beef up the internal Yellow Box descendant they’d been previously using to make Safari and iTunes run on Windows (essentially porting large chunks of macOS to Windows) to be able to support Xcode, or following the direction of their more recent iCloud, Music, and TV apps write a WinUI-based version of Xcode for Windows paired with an all new iOS Emulator from scratch.

It’d be a huge investment with returns that are unclear at best.

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1. gabayou ◴[06 Apr 25 12:02 UTC] No.43600818[source]▶
Any more info about this version of Yellow Box running on Windows? Apple’s Windows apps have always fascinated me.
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2. cosmic_cheese ◴[06 Apr 25 13:13 UTC] No.43601215[source]▶
I don’t have much, except that it seems that the versions used by Safari and iTunes are different and port different amounts of the OS.

The Safari version was considerably more complete and included the entire text rendering system as well as several era-appropriate Aqua UI widgets. It feels very much like a Mac app.

The iTunes version seems much more trimmed down, using Windows text rendering and win32 widgets in place of Cocoa/Aqua in most places. Accordingly, it feels more Windows-like.

It might be interesting to try to build a toy app against the Safari version just for kicks.