Boot a virtual iPhone on an Apple Silicon Mac for research
Made by Lakr
View profile on GitHub (opens in a new tab)A command-line tool that boots a virtual iPhone on an Apple Silicon Mac using Apple’s own Virtualization framework together with the infrastructure Apple built for Private Cloud Compute research.
One command runs the whole pipeline — download the firmware, patch it, restore it, install it and boot — and you then reach the running phone over SSH or a screen-sharing connection. Five firmware patch variants are offered with increasing amounts of security bypass, and the project documents what each one changes.
Can I use this?
You'll need An Apple Silicon Mac with security protections relaxed · Setup needed
Worth knowing This one has a real cost of entry: it requires relaxing or disabling macOS’s System Integrity Protection and its code-signing enforcement, which are the protections that stop unsigned software from doing whatever it likes on your Mac. That is a meaningful reduction in your machine’s security, not a checkbox, and it is why this is research tooling rather than something to try casually. It needs Apple Silicon on macOS 15 or later plus Xcode and the iOS SDK, and it cannot run on a Mac that is itself a virtual machine. MIT licence. BuildTube has not run or verified this software.
Why it's here
Not trending this week
Last seen on the GitHub trending list on 20 September 2026. It stays on BuildTube so you can still find it.
- 14,936 people have starred it on GitHub.
Numbers checked on 6 October 2026; not refreshed since.
Behind it
See the code on GitHubBuildTube has not run or verified this project. Everything above is written from what the creator published.
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