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A comment on Termux. Parent comment

Re:Termux by nasretdinov on Monday February 02, 2026 @07:50AM (#46855422)
In iOS we can only use something like ish.app which emulates x86 and runs full Linux distro instead, with predictably much lower performance than Termux (due to JIT being banned in iOS apps), but without any restrictions Android has on the executables
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Re:Termux by DrNefario on Monday February 02, 2026 @07:54AM (#46855482)
I don't have an iPhone, but wouldn't UTM be better for that use case?
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Re:Termux by nasretdinov on Monday February 02, 2026 @08:24AM (#46855754)
UTM can't be installed from the App Store unfortunately, and without a developer license you are limited to 7 days for each successful on-device reinstall
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Re:Termux by dudewhocodes on Monday February 02, 2026 @08:37AM (#46855896)
Apple somewhat lifted the emulator restrictions on the App Store which means you can install UTM from here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/utm-se-retro-pc-emulator/id156...
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Re:Termux by nasretdinov on Monday February 02, 2026 @08:54AM (#46856064)
Nice, I must've missed that. Downloading it right away :)

Edit: well, it's also very slow unfortunately. I believe iPhone CPUs either don't support virtualisation or they don't expose it (edit #2: it's the latter). Either way, QEMU is struggling quite a bit, and due to it being a GUI it's even slower than what iSH could do

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Re:Termux by maxkfranz on Monday February 02, 2026 @09:27AM (#46856411)
iSH is great as an ssh client. It has a good font out of the box, so it displays tmux and neovim properly.

a-Shell should be faster than iSH for local stuff since the tools are compiled natively, but nothing on iOS, as far as I know, compares to Termux on Android.

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Re:Termux by nasretdinov on Monday February 02, 2026 @02:55PM (#46860502)
a-Shell looks amazing, thanks for mentioning it
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Re:Termux by MarsIronPI on Monday February 02, 2026 @12:26PM (#46858590)
Why does Apple ban JIT? It clearly doesn't ban emulation inherently, so why is emulation OK but not JIT?
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Re:Termux by tadfisher on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @12:36AM (#46866921)
I believe it's a ban on executing any runtime-generated or downloaded machine code, not just JIT in particular.
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Re:Termux by nasretdinov on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @07:23AM (#46870112)
Probably ban on any unsigned code tbh
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Re:Termux by MarsIronPI on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @10:09AM (#46871909)
Then how is iSH allowed on the app store?
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Re:Termux by tadfisher on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @12:40PM (#46874226)
Elsewhere in this thread, someone mentioned that ISH is a full PC emulator running Alpine. You wouldn't necessarily need JIT or native execution for a software VM.
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