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Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

There's no real reason why Apple can't build a "development sandbox" app that emulates a terminal (that has no access to anything on the iPad outside the sandbox app) that includes a terminal, a package manager (possibly acquiring Homebrew to help them make it happen), possibly a wrapping GUI to manage secrets, IDE-style text editor, etc.

I'm not really sure why nobody's built one yet except for the sheer complexity involved. But it certainly seems doable.

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There is iSH which somehow managed to make it onto the App Store. Only problem is it's emulating x86 so it's not exactly the full potential of the M1.

AIUI and IIRC, iSH implements just enough of an x86 emulator to be able to interpret x86 binaries and JIT "compile" them to a series of function calls rather than directly to native machine code, and it implements enough of the x86 Linux ABI to be able to run most binaries. In short, it's effectively treating x86 machine code as a scripting language, and Apple does allow scripting languages (e.g. Python) on the App Store.

The iSH team did run into some friction with Apple over the fact that the built-in filesystem image is Alpine and thus includes a package manager, but apparently they were able to resolve that situation in a way that allowed them to keep `apk` in the built-in filesystem image: https://ish.app/blog/app-store-removal

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