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:''This page is about software that emulates iOS on other hardware, like desktops.''{{for|emulators that run on IOS|Emulators on iOS}}
'''iOS''' devices started the smartphone craze, which would go on to replace conventional mobile phones in both Japan (which had its own subset of cell phones) and the rest of the world, with more advanced touch-controlled devices.
Formerly, iOS was used for both Apple's phones and tablets. Then, the iOS brand was split in two parts in 2019, with iOS now being the OS exclusively used in the iPhone and the now-defunct iPod Touch. The second half, named '''iPadOS''', is a fork of iOS made for iPads, hence it's name. Most iOS apps and games work on iPadOS.
Unlike its direct competitor, [[Android emulators|Android]], there are practically no usable emulators, as the official iOS SDK (macOS-only) only allows for running your own projects, i.e., they run code generated for an x86 target rather than ARM code as used by iOS. Some simulators (e.g., [[BlackThunder]]) make use of the simulator in the iOS SDK to run a few chosen iOS apps that are recompiled for x86. Unlike previous emulation trails, BlackThunder first loads a highly trimmed Hackintosh image via VirtualBox, which loads Xcode and an iOS simulator into it, then runs decompiled iOS apps recompiled for the x86 architecture. Appetize.io and other tools that claim to emulate iOS on a web browser are in reality just the iOS simulator in XCode wrapped around a cloud stream to the web browser, and like the iOS XCode simulator, need the source code to run. More recently, touchHLE managed to get a few older iPhone OS apps running by recreating some of iOS’s standard libraries and emulating just the iPhone’s CPU, and nearly the same time, QEMU-iOS got released and can successfully emulate iPhone OS 1.0 on an iPod Touch 1st generation, albeit with bugs.
