Softwarelinuxiphoneipadiosopen-sourcesideloadingarm64
LinuxRunner Puts Debian, Arch and Alpine Desktops on an iPhone With No Jailbreak, Running Firefox and Blender Through Its Own ARM64 Interpreter
LinuxRunner is a free, open-source iPhone and iPad app that runs real ARM64 Linux programs, from Firefox to Telegram Desktop, inside a desktop you sideload yourself, built on the iSH and ios-linuxkit projects.
The project’s README puts the pitch in bold: “No jailbreak. No virtual machine. No JIT required by the release build.” Underneath that sits a “custom ARM64 interpreter and Linux compatibility layer,” which reads each Linux program’s instructions and translates its system calls into ones iOS will allow.
The screenshots show Firefox, Blender and the Dolphin file manager running in a desktop on a phone screen. Telegram Desktop was “tested on Arch Linux ARM: login, sending messages and calls,” the maker writes.
You pick a distribution when you set it up. Debian 13 comes with apt and an experimental KDE Plasma desktop, Arch Linux ARM with pacman and an Openbox desktop with an LXQt panel, and Alpine 3.24 with apk. The desktop itself is drawn by an X server running inside the app, and “Xvfb and x11vnc feed the native desktop viewer,” the README says. Graphics run in software through Mesa, with “an experimental Metal bridge” for Apple’s own GPU interface.
LinuxRunner is the newest layer on a project that’s been growing for years. iSH, started by Theodore Dubois, describes itself as “a project to get a Linux shell running on iOS, using usermode x86 emulation and syscall translation.” Rui Carmo took that idea to ARM64 with ios-linuxkit this spring and announced it on his blog in May. “I’m done waiting for Apple to fix things,” his README quotes him, saying a decent way to run Linux binaries on his iPad was something that “should exist.” The README is plain about the trade: the interpreter works without JIT, RWX memory or MAP_JIT, and “it trades native speed for a usable Linux environment.”
The first release went up on October 25, 2026, and version 1.0.1 followed two days later. The maker, who posts as Leminos, licenses it under the GPL-3.0.
One line in the known-issues list stays open: “An older report of an iPhone 11/iOS 17 launch black screen remains unresolved.” Nobody has said yet whether that’s the phone, the iOS version, or something deeper in the interpreter.