Paul Morris·

iOS Virtual Machine Announced, Here’s Everything You Need To Know About It

A company called Corellium is making a splash on social media by claiming to be the first business to offer a virtualized iOS device experience to developers and testers.

The immediate reaction to this may be “why is that even important?” or “how does that differ from the Xcode experience that developers currently enjoy?”

These would be perfectly valid questions as there is sometimes a lack of understanding involved in the differences of simulation and emulation or virtualization. At present, Apple currently bundles in an iOS Simulator experience with its main developer tool, Xcode. This allows developers to run apps and experiences on simulated versions of the company’s devices utilizing the resources of the machine that it’s installed on.

What Corellium is looking to do is more akin to how Android applications are tested and ran by offering a full and complete virtualized experienced which is identical to running the software or service on a physical iOS device but without actually having to have the expense and trouble associated with owning each iPhone or iPad.

The company is defining this as the “future of mobile development” which will give developers instant access to run their creations on virtualized iPhones and iPads on a Mac or PC which are running actual real versions of iOS. This should instantly remove a lot of the issues and limitations which are associated with simulated testing.

This experience would also allow testers, researchers, and developers to install a pre-jailbroken version of iOS to the virtualized experience in order to test and demonstrate new tweaks and experiences.

There is little to nothing known about the company behind this at the moment but we do know that this is the same tool that was demonstrated by Chris Wade (@cwdotme on Twitter) a little while back and that it will also come integrated with a web-based version of Cycript, put together by Jay Freeman ‘saurik’.

As and when more information becomes available of the Corellium iOS virtualization experience, we will be sure to let you know with immediate effect, including how it can benefit the jailbreak community going forward. For now, those looking to get an early hands-on experience on the tool can request an early access for March release over at corellium.com.

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