Let’s clear the air. You will find software claiming to be “EXE to IPA Converters.” They are almost universally one of three things:
If you are the developer of the EXE (i.e., you have the source code), you can recompile for iOS using:
There is no automated tool that takes a compiled EXE and spits out a native IPA. exe to ipa converter
Some apps (mostly those that have been jailbroken or sideloaded via enterprise certificates) create a virtual Windows machine inside iOS. The converter here is actually a compatibility layer (like Wine). The EXE runs inside a simulation of a PC. The cost? Your battery drains in 20 minutes, and the performance is akin to a PowerPoint slideshow.
Tool: UTM (Universal Turing Machine) or iDOS. How it works: You install an emulator app on your iPhone. Inside that emulator, you install Windows 95, XP, or 98. Then, you run your EXE inside that virtual machine. Let’s clear the air
An .exe file is a Portable Executable (PE) format containing machine code compiled for x86/x64 processors, designed to run on the Windows NT kernel. An .ipa file is an iOS App Store Package containing a Mach-O binary compiled for ARM64 processors, designed to run on Apple’s XNU kernel (iOS).
Because an .exe contains Windows-specific system calls (Win32 API) and an .ipa requires Apple-specific system calls (Cocoa/UIKit), the two formats are mutually exclusive at the binary level. Any solution claiming to perform "direct conversion" is either a scam or a misrepresentation of an emulation/transpilation process. There is no automated tool that takes a
Use cross-platform frameworks
Compile shared/native code for ARM
Cloud/Remote-hosted approach
Automated conversion tools — limited and rare