While more than 3.5 million people have spent the last couple of weeks glued to a brand-new Nintendo Switch 2, X user PatRyk (@Patrosi73) decided to invest their time elsewhere: trying to run iOS on the original Nintendo Switch. And they did it! Sort of.
According to PatRyk, they spent two full days working on a way to run a full build of iOS inside QEMU, an open-source machine emulator and virtualizer that can simulate entirely different hardware architectures in software.
The result is a full iOS environment being emulated directly on the Switch’s Nvidia Tegra X1 processor.
The “world’s slowest”, but funnest iPhone
Before anyone gets too excited, let’s set expectations: per PatRyk’s own admission, this thing is barely functional:
I’ve lost my mind (and 2 days of my life to install this)
Behold: the world’s slowest “iPhone” 🎉🎉
Takes over 20 minutes to boot, kernel panics every 2nd thing you do, can’t open any apps (they all time out and crash) 🚀🚀 pic.twitter.com/r3B3JPDUDV — PatRyk (@Patrosi73) June 17, 2025
Still, the fact that it even boots at all is impressive enough, especially considering that iOS is famously hard to get running on anything other than Apple’s own devices (or at best, inside Apple’s Xcode simulator on a Mac).
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