Light Touch
Built with use from agentic coding products.
Light Touch runs classic Apple devices on your Mac: the original iPhone and iPod touch through the iPhone 4, iPod touch 4 and the first iPad, on the iPhone OS and iOS versions they shipped with. Each device runs Apple's own firmware in an emulator, so it behaves like the real thing: the Home screen, the built-in apps, App Store apps and games of the era, Wi-Fi, music and photos, and on the iPhones a simulated cellular network for calls and texts.
Download
Get the latest notarized build from Releases, unzip it, and move Light Touch.app to Applications.
- macOS 14.4 or later, on Apple silicon or Intel.
- Light Touch includes a ready-to-use iPod touch (2nd gen) on iOS 3.1.3. For every other device and version it downloads Apple's original firmware (from Apple, or from public archives for builds Apple no longer hosts), checks it against its published hash, and prepares the device on your Mac. You can also import an IPSW you already have.
Devices
| Device | Versions |
|---|---|
| iPhone | iPhone OS 1.0 |
| iPhone 3GS | iPhone OS 3.0 to iOS 6.1.6 |
| iPhone 4 (GSM) | iOS 4.0 to 7.1.2, plus iOS 6.0 and 7.0 betas |
| iPod touch (1st gen) | iPhone OS 1.1 to 1.1.5 |
| iPod touch (2nd gen) | iPhone OS 2.1.1 to iOS 4.2.1 |
| iPod touch (3rd gen) | iPhone OS 3.1.1 to iOS 5.1.1 |
| iPod touch (4th gen) | iOS 4.1 to 6.1.6, plus the iOS 6.0 beta |
| iPad | iPhone OS 3.2 to iOS 5.1.1 |
Most builds are marked experimental: they boot and pass their checks, but haven't been through as much use as the stable ones. Turn on Show experimental in the Add Device sheet to see them.
Building from source
See CONTRIBUTING.md. The tests come in three tiers:
# no emulator: the packages' Swift Testing suites xcodebuild test -workspace LightTouchMac.xcworkspace -scheme LightTouchMac -testPlan Unit # emulator sessions, headless and silent, on a prepared device (sessions --help lists the checks) swift run --package-path tests/sessions sessions single PREPARED_BASE # a built app: signatures, bundle, closure and the built-in iPod's boot TEST_RUNNER_LTM_RELEASE_APP="path/to/Light Touch.app" xcodebuild test -workspace LightTouchMac.xcworkspace \ -scheme LightTouchMac -testPlan Release
License and credits
Light Touch is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or (at your option) any later version; see LICENSE.
It stands on a lot of other work:
- qemu-ios, the emulator, built on QEMU and grown out of devos50's qemu-ios (GPL-2.0).
- libimobiledevice, libusbmuxd, libplist, libtatsu and a usbmuxd fork for talking to the devices.
- iBoot32Patcher, FFmpeg, GLib, libslirp, PCRE2, pixman, OpenSSL, and Unrar.swift with RARLAB's UnRAR.
Each bundled component's license (and, for GPL and LGPL components, where to get its source) is in
the app under Contents/Resources/licenses and in About Light Touch.
iPhone, iPod touch and iPad are trademarks of Apple Inc. Light Touch is not affiliated with Apple.