touchHLE

touchHLE is a high-level emulator for iPhone OS apps, written in Rust. It was started by hikari_no_yume in December 2022, first released in February 2023, and is now developed by a group of volunteers. It is open source under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.

Instead of emulating the iPhone hardware and running iPhone OS, touchHLE provides its own versions of the system frameworks, such as Foundation, UIKit, OpenGL ES and OpenAL, and only runs the app’s own ARM code in an emulated CPU. It targets iPhone and iPod touch apps for iPhone OS 2.x and 3.0. Most apps from that era do not work yet, and support is focused on games; the touchHLE app compatibility database lists which apps are known to work. Apps must be decrypted to run, and 64-bit iOS apps will never be supported.

touchHLE is still in development. The latest release is version 0.2.3 from January 2026, with official builds for Windows (x64), macOS (x64, which also runs on Apple Silicon through Rosetta) and Android (AArch64). Mouse, touch, game controller and accelerometer input can all be used for touch and tilt controls.