iOS (iPhone OS)

iPhone OS is the operating system Apple released with the first iPhone in June 2007. It was built on the same core as Mac OS X and was designed around a multi-touch screen rather than a keyboard or stylus. It was renamed iOS in 2010.

At first only Apple’s own applications could run on the iPhone. That changed with iPhone OS 2.0 and the App Store in July 2008, which let other developers sell apps directly to iPhone and iPod touch owners. Games quickly became the most popular category.

Early App Store hits included Super Monkey Ball, Rolando, Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D, Doodle Jump and the first Angry Birds. Many of these games were later removed from the store, and the 32-bit apps from this era stopped working entirely when iOS 11 dropped 32-bit support in 2017.

Emulating iOS apps is much harder than emulating a games console, because apps depend on a large set of system frameworks rather than fixed hardware. There is currently no general iOS emulator for running modern apps outside Apple devices.

Today, touchHLE is the main option for playing early iPhone OS 2.x and 3.0 games on Windows, macOS and Android. It re-implements the system frameworks itself instead of running iPhone OS, so it only supports a limited, growing list of apps.