README

App Sandbox

App Sandbox is a virtual machine app for Windows and macOS that's focused on performance and ease of use.

Windows features:
- Works on Windows 11 Home or Pro, without Hyper-V
- Windows 11 or Ubuntu 26.04 LTS VM Support
- Zero touch install
- Copy and Paste
- 2 Channel Audio
- GPU Acceleration via Paravirtualization (GPU-PV) with support for DirectX 12 (Windows only), OpenGL, Vulkan, CUDA, OpenCL
- GPU Hardware Video Decoder/Encoder support
- SSH via Hyper-V socket proxy (no network required)
- Snapshots
- Multiple resolution options as well as optional dynamic resolution
- Host to client hot-key support
- Provision and boot with / without internet
- Supports running Claude Cowork and Docker inside the VM thanks to Nested Virtualization Support
- Headless mode: a scriptable local HTTP/JSON API + dependency-free Python SDK (asb.py) for creating and driving GPU-accelerated VMs programmatically

Mac features:
- macOS or Windows 11 ARM VM support
- Zero touch install
- Copy and Paste
- 2 Channel Audio
- macOS: GPU Acceleration via Paravirtualization with support for Metal, Windows: No GPU Acceleration
- SSH via virtio-vsock (no network required)
- Dynamic display sizing (optional on Windows)
- Provision and boot with / without internet
- Headless mode: the same scriptable local HTTP/JSON API + Python SDK (asb.py) as on Windows, for driving macOS and Windows 11 VMs programmatically

Requirements:
Windows 11 with an x64 Processor or macOS 27 or newer (M Series)

 About App Sandbox

App Sandbox creates and runs full desktop virtual machines — Windows 11, Ubuntu, and
macOS. It is free and open-source (MIT), distributed as prebuilt binaries (EV-signed on
Windows, Apple-Developer-signed on macOS) on its
Releases page. It is driven two
ways: from a graphical UI, or programmatically through the local API with a
dependency-free Python SDK (asb.py). Either way you pick an OS, point it at an installer
image, and App Sandbox provisions the disk, runs an unattended install, and boots the
guest. You supply a Windows or Ubuntu ISO; macOS guests download their restore image
automatically. It runs on a Windows 11 (x64) PC or an Apple Silicon Mac, including laptops.

Runs on Windows 11 Home, without Hyper-V. On Windows, App Sandbox does not use Hyper-V
or Hyper-V Manager; it creates and runs VMs through the Windows Host Compute System (HCS)
and Host Compute Network (HCN) APIs, which require only the Virtual Machine Platform
feature. Hyper-V is limited to Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise, while Virtual Machine
Platform is available on Windows 11 Home, so a Windows 11 Pro license is not required.
Virtual Machine Platform is the same Windows feature WSL2 uses.

What you can use it for:
- A full Windows or Ubuntu desktop VM — a complete graphical OS with GPU acceleration
  (OpenGL, Vulkan, CUDA) — for building and testing your own software on a clean install.
- Running a program in a VM, kept separate from your main OS and files.
- Developing and testing Windows

Top issues

Discussions

Latest release

This release is to fix 3 bugs related to 0.1.10 which contained many new features 

 Fixed

- Restore Windows VM booting on M3 and newer Macs by disabling nested virtualization.
- Remove noisy shared GPU success and fallback logs on Windows hosts.
- Prevent old frames from reappearing when resizing the viewer with GPU sharing and Match window size enabled.