The reason I imagine this comes up as a thread of discussion is because Apple promised they would do this long before Corellium existed--at least four years ago: the meeting I was at--and I heard it had likely even been shelved!... but it has seemingly now become something to bother with doing, and as far as anyone can tell it is because Apple's lawsuit with Corellium non-trivially tries to claim that Corellium can't use certain "obvious" defenses because their emulator somehow competes with and carves into the market for Apple's promised security research device program, which is in some sense the Daikatana of this community. So to people who might otherwise think "oh, Apple loves security researchers: look at this program as proof!" the real thought should be "Apple is likely only doing this at all to help them win a lawsuit and injunction against a company which provides the tools used by a lot of security researchers" (a lawsuit which also wants to push through Corellium so they can attack their customers).
Apple's lawsuit is about infringement of their copyright. And that gives them exclusive rights over their intellectual property without any conditions. Legally, their case isn't better or worse because of this program. The likely reason they announced it just before suing Corellium is to avoid giving the impression that they were attacking the security research community in general, rather than Corellium specifically.
My hope is that they'll settle the case and Corellium's assets go to Apple and the founders become employees and continue to work on their product, because clearly a virtualized service is better than a physical device. But perhaps there are other legal reasons I'm not aware of why they'd still want to do this program with physical devices.
You have a misinterpretation of the strength of copyright: there are a lot of legally protected (both by statute and by case law) things you can do with someone else's copyrighted works as long as you don't copy them (and even if you do make some copies, it is sometimes OK; I've cited this case a couple times already on this thread, but see Sega v. Accolade: Accolade ended up winning this case despite the fact that they had to actually make "infringing" copies in order to accomplish their goal of software interoperability).
Apple's case directly cites their Security Research Device program in the first paragraph of introduction on "Corellium's Infringing Product"... and, notably, also pushes into the idea that one of the things Corellium supposedly infringed was Apple's GUI Elements, which feels a bit ridiculous to me... (I don't feel like Apple had their best lawyers work on this one ;P).
> Corellium is “a startup that sells a product that allows users to create virtual instances of almost any iOS device in the world.” Corellium’s product creates exact digital
replicas of Apple’s iOS, iTunes, and GUI Elements (referred to here as the “Corellium Apple Product”), available via either Corellium’s web-based platform or a privately installed, Corellium-provided platform. Corellium admits that its product will compete with Apple’s iOS Security Research Device Program.
Their case also attempts to directly push at the problem using DMCA Section 1201 language, and notes that one of the things that Corellium is used for is to jailbreak your device; the language used claims that these jailbreaks--which are the alternative constantly cited here for what security researchers can use to learn about and test on iOS (ironic, as they are themselves failures of security)--are "unlawful ends" (which isn't true, but the fact that Apple wants this to be true so hard demonstrates their distaste for people being able to access their own hardware).
> The Apple Corellium Product also provides users with the ability to “jailbreak” virtual iOS devices. Jailbreaking refers to the act of modifying iOS to circumvent the software restrictions that prevent unfettered access to the operating system. Corellium openly markets the ability of its technology to “jailbreak... any version” of iOS. Corellium provides its jailbreaking technology to all its customers, regardless of their purpose.
> On April 1, 2019, Corellium again highlighted the unlawful ends to which its product is aimed by publicly acknowledging that it had given access to its platform to the developers of code used to jailbreak iOS devices called “unc0ver,” so the developers could test the jailbreaking code “on any device running any firmware” and distribute that code to the
public. Within weeks, those developers released a new version of unc0ver that allowed jailbreaking of iOS 12.6 In other words, Corellium has admitted not only that its product is designed to circumvent technological protection measures Apple puts in place to prevent access to and infringement of its copyrighted works in iOS, but that it has aided and abetted the creation and trafficking of other software that is also designed to circumvent those same technological measures.
