Modern Apple iPhones have incredibly powerful SoCs, but few apps and games tap their full potential. One area that can push chips like the A19 Pro and A20 Pro to their limits is game emulation.
Several game emulators, including Delta for Nintendo systems, PPSSPP for the PlayStation Portable, and Dolphin for the GameCube and Wii among others are available
However, unlike Android, iOS has lacked emulators for Windows PC games. That changes with Madeira.
Madeira lets users run Windows PC games on a non-jailbroken iPhone. According to developer Will Faust, Madeira is essentially a port of Wine (ARM64EC) for iOS, combining FEX-Emu for x86-64-to-ARM64 translation and DXMT for D3D11-to-Metal translation into a single pipeline.
Madeira requires at least an iPhone 13 Pro powered by the A15 Bionic or a newer model.
In the project’s GitHub repo, Faust claims that Madeira can run games like Thumper and Ultrakill, while Marvel Cosmic Invasion “has reached gameplay,” albeit unreliably.
Now, Madeira also appears capable of running the highly demanding Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR 2) entirely on device on an iPhone 18 Pro. While the initial attempt was little more than a slideshow, with single-digit frame rates and numerous graphical glitches, the developer has achieved nearly 30 fps at close to 720p in more recent builds. However, there’s still a long way to go, especially regarding the layout of the onscreen controls.
Additionally, Madeira now supports a swap-like implementation that can offload memory to the iPhone’s storage. This reportedly kept RDR 2‘s memory footprint around the 7.6 GB mark, with the possibility of lowering it even further to allow running on 8 GB iPhones.
Faust also has a working copy of Grand Theft Auto V running on the iPhone. The Wine emulation on the iPhone seems to be identifying the SoC as an M5.
Performance seems decent for an initial implementation and should improve with further optimization.
The developers note in the project’s Discord channel that Steam is quite the re workaround is Madeira Dock, a headless Steam client that uses only the necessary verified Steam DLLs, without the overhead of the full client. This is not a bypass for Steam’s DRM, however
An alternative, they note, is to use DRM-free games from GOG.
The project has also demonstrated Fallout 4 running on iOS, along with several other 32-bit games including Dead Space, Mirror’s Edge, and Far Cry 3.
Just-in-time (JIT) compilation is required for fast, real-time performance when emulating apps on a non-native host CPU. A major limitation of the Apple App Store (from iOS 18.4+) is that it does not allow apps or emulators to use JIT owing to security concerns. The only exceptions are approved alternative web browser engines that use BrowserEngineKit.
Therefore, the only way to run emulators like Madeira with optimal performance is to sideload the IPA manually and enable JIT. Which means apps like Madeira will never be distributed through the App Store.
Sideloading on iOS can be a bit tricky if you are new to the process, but it is not too difficult once you get the hang of it.
You can purchase an Apple Developer certificate for $99, which allows you to use the sideloaded app for one year before renewal. Users with regular Apple accounts can also sideload apps, provided they renew them every seven days.
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> Expert reviews and news on laptops, smartphones and tech innovations > News > News Archive > Newsarchive 2026 09 > Developer shows off Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA V, Fallout 4, and other AAA PC games running natively on iPhone 18 Pro
Vaidyanathan Subramaniam, 2026-09-27 (Update: 2026-09-27)
