osx - Can I run iOS apps on my Mac?

26
2013-07
  • Ken

    I've seen a number of neat iPhone apps recently that I'd like to use. In particular, there are a number of neat musical apps (metronome, tuner, etc.) that seem highly rated, and have no real Mac equivalent. I don't have a recent iPod/iPhone/iPad (I don't need portability or a phone and it seems silly to pay hundreds of dollars to run $15 worth of apps), but I do have an Intel (C2D) Mac.

    Can the iPhone dev simulator, or any other emulator, download and run iPhone App Store apps?

    • Answers
  • kiamlaluno

    AFAIK, iPhone simulator doesn't download an application from the App Store; it's just used to debug an iOS application you are developing.

  • Covar

    Unfortunately the iPhone/iPad simulator is only available as part of the dev tools, and does not contain any syncing abilities with iTunes. It also doesn't have an app store app, so you can't buy applications from within the simulator.

    As it's primary use is for developers to test their apps without the actual hardware you will most likely never see the features you want added to the simulator.

  • Meltemi

    Possible? Yes, but...currently the only way to run iOS apps on a Mac is via the iPhone/iPad Simulator (available in the iOS SDK)...AND you need the source code for the app you want to run.

  • Brock Woolf

    No it wouldn't be possible, unless somebody came a up with an iOS emulator that would let you run ARM based binaries on your Intel based Mac/PC. Basically the same as what they have done with reverse engineering the Super Nintendo and the resultant emulators that have been written to emulate Super Nintendo roms. No doubt someone will do it one day many years from now.

  • uSlackr

    If you are developing iOS apps in XCode, you can use the iPhone or iPad emulator to run your app, but there is no way to run a precompiled app (such as from the app store)


    • Related Question

    osx - Mac 10.6 Cisco VPN: Can I run scripts/apps on connection?
  • Carnell

    I had been using shimo to connect to my vpn and shimo has the ability to execute apps/scripts when the connection happens. I have moved to 10.6 and am now using the built in client. I don't see any way to execute apps/scripts when the built in client connects. Does anyone know if this can be done? If so please provide details.

    Thanks


    • Related Answers
  • ulrikhansen

    Well, as far as I remember, Shimo can you any of your excisting connections. If its 10.6 compatible, you could just use it for the triggering/scripting.

    If I'm wrong, sorry. That's just how it worked the last time I used it.

    //Ulrik

  • mmDonuts

    Use an ip-up (and an ip-down if needed) script in /etc/ppp, a quick article on macosxhints.com has a few details.

  • Rizwan Kassim

    Use something like NetworkLocation to detect when you get the new IP address on your private network and trigger certain actions.

    To do it for free, you could run a cron job every minute to detect if you've got an ip address in the VPN and trigger an action the first time it sees it.

  • Hasaan Chop

    The right way to do this is with an ip-up script in /etc, but historically, this has not actually worked properly on OS X.

    I have not tried it since 10.4, but what I had to do as a workaround back then was setup a launchd job that watched /var/log/ppp.log for relevant (i.e. VPN-related) entries.

    I'd say both methods are worth a shot.