This post is rather outdated and only worked for iOS 7. simject supports iOS 7 and newer simulators; you most likely want that instead.

With the iPhone 4 being the last iOS 7 device standing that can be jailbroken tethered, it’s gotten much harder to test and update tweaks for the new firmware ahead of the untethered jailbreak release.

But there’s still a way to do this if you’re on a Mac. The iOS Simulator is basically already jailbroken, in the sense that you can access its filesystem and not all security policies are enforced. Therefore you can test your SpringBoard tweaks on iOS 7 with the simulator.

Do keep in mind that this will only work with tweaks that only need to load into SpringBoard or other daemons. If you want to test a tweak inside apps, unfortunately you’ll need to wait for a proper Substrate for OS X release that can do this.

Installing

First, you need to install Substrate. The binaries in the Substrate package in Cydia (except for MobileSafety) are compiled for both armv6 and i386/x86_64, so you can simply download, extract, and copy the files out of the package like so:

wget http://apt.saurik.com/debs/mobilesubstrate_0.9.4001_iphoneos-arm.deb mkdir substrate dpkg-deb -x mobilesubstrate_0.9.4001_iphoneos-arm.deb substrate sudo mv substrate/Library/Frameworks/CydiaSubstrate.framework /Library/Frameworks/CydiaSubstrate.framework sudo mv substrate/Library/MobileSubstrate /Library/MobileSubstrate sudo mv substrate/usr/lib/ * /usr/lib

Injecting

Awesome, now we need to get it to inject into the iOS Simulator. As of iOS 7, SpringBoard is launched by launchd_sim instead of directly by the simulator binary, so the hack that many people used in the past no longer works. However, you can still use Substrate by manually modifying LaunchDaemon plists found in the SDK.

Head over to the LaunchDaemons directory of the simulator’s sysroot on your Mac:

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator7.0.sdk/System/Library/LaunchDaemons

Make a backup of com.apple.SpringBoard.plist somewhere other than the LaunchDaemons directory (otherwise SpringBoard will be loaded twice).

Now open the original plist in your favorite text or plist editor (Xcode has one built in). It’s a binary plist, so if your text editor isn’t cool enough to convert it to XML automatically, you can do so with plutil -convert xml1 com.apple.SpringBoard.plist . Add an EnvironmentVariables key, and set its value to a dictionary containing DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES , and set the value of that to the location of your dylib (not MobileSubstrate.dylib).

You should end up with something like this:

If you have the simulator running, close and re-launch it for the changes to apply.

Environment

Next, you must export $IPHONE_SIMULATOR_ROOT . Open ~/.bash_profile (or the equivalent for your shell) and add:

export IPHONE_SIMULATOR_ROOT = /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator7.0.sdk

Load the changes into your shell by executing . ~/.bash_profile , or just close and launch a new shell.

Finally, you need to make a minor modification to theos, since the iOS 7 SDK’s ld doesn’t like one of the flags that theos passes to it. Open $THEOS/makefiles/targets/Darwin/simulator.mk in your editor, and find the following line:

_TARGET_OSX_VERSION_FLAG = -mmacosx-version-min = $ ( if $(_TARGET_VERSION_GE_4_0) ,10.6,10.5 )

Replace it with this:

_TARGET_VERSION_GE_7_0 = $ ( call __simplify,_TARGET_VERSION_GE_7_0, $( shell $(THEOS_BIN_PATH) /vercmp.pl $(_THEOS_TARGET_SDK_VERSION) ge 7.0 ) ) _TARGET_OSX_VERSION_FLAG = $ ( if $(_TARGET_VERSION_GE_7_0) ,-miphoneos-version-min = 7.0,-mmacosx-version-min = $ ( if $(_TARGET_VERSION_GE_4_0) ,10.6,10.5 ))

Linking

Your copy of libsubstrate.dylib won’t be able to be linked against, since it doesn’t have a slice for the iOS Simulator platform. You can download a version that does like so:

mv $THEOS /lib/libsubstrate.dylib $THEOS /lib/libsubstrate.dylib_ wget http://cdn.hbang.ws/dl/libsubstrate_ios7sim.dylib -O $THEOS /lib/libsubstrate.dylib

Note that this only contains an x86_64 slice for OS X, since it isn’t possible to have multiple i386 slices. However, you won’t need to worry about this unless you have OS X projects that depend on OS X 10.5 or older.

Compiling

Simply compiling tweaks like normal is not enough for them to work in the simulator: in this case, they’ll be compiled for the ARM architecture, and your Mac runs on Intel. It’s fairly simple to do this with theos, however, by setting the TARGET variable.

If you don’t already have TARGET set in your makefile, at the top of your makefile, add this line:

TARGET = simulator

If you do, set the target parameter to simulator . For example:

TARGET = simulator:clang:7.0

(Check out theiostream’s documentation on TARGET if you haven’t tried it before.)

That’s it!