Hackers Are Running Apple's iOS on Android Phones for the First Time

By Jose Antonio Lanz

Hobbyists are booting Apple’s iOS, the software that runs iPhones, on Android phones just to prove that they can, and video demonstrations are going viral on social media.

One clip of iOS 16 on a Redmi Note 12 has passed 2 million views on X, and another developer posted a build running on a Nothing 3a.

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iOS, the operating system that runs everything on an iPhone from the touchscreen to the apps, is built to run only on Apple’s own hardware. Choosing a phone has meant choosing its software, and the reverse. If that wall cracks, cheap and old phones could one day run software they were never sold with.

Android has run on iPhones before: a project called iDroid let early iPhones boot it in April 2010. A decade later, security firm Corellium launched Project Sandcastle, which put Android 10 on iPhones with Apple’s A10 chip.

Nobody has been able to make it the other way around—until now.

Users are achieving good results with a combination of tools. The closest public code is an open-source project on GitHub, the site where developers share code, called ios-sweet, built for the Redmi Note 10 Pro.

It takes XNU, the kernel Apple publishes openly (the core of an operating system, which talks to the chip, memory and storage), and patches it to run on that phone’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 732G chip. Unmodified iOS 16.7.16 files from an iPhone X then sit on top.

The “readme” file from its developers calls the project an “experimental bring-up, not a usable phone OS,” and says the Redmi Note 10 Pro reaches the lock screen, home screen, Control Center and Settings, with touch and the buttons responding. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mobile data, audio and the camera do not work, the gesture to leave an app does nothing, and with no graphics driver the processor draws the screen at roughly 20 to 30 frames per second.

A separate group calling itself OOSexGang says its HackiOS project runs iOS 16.5 on a Poco X5 Pro, using a custom UEFI (the firmware that starts a device) and the XNU kernel. The researcher sharing the demo notes there is no public source code or independent verification. In a newer clip, Safari downloads an Android app file from APKMirror and then fails to open it, which, to be fair, is what iOS has always done with Android apps.

The idea of running things where they shouldn’t has been gaining enthusiasts with the advent of AI and the ability to ship code—and improve it—extremely fast. Just days ago. the security firm Calif.io jailbroke an iPhone 18 Pro on stage at the Hexacon conference in Paris, and the root access survived a reboot. Jailbreaking removes Apple’s restrictions to give a user deep control of the phone.

Another major tool that sparked the movement is REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything, a free toolkit that lets AI coding assistants pick software apart, with examples that included a developer’s demo of GTA V running on iOS.

For now, the practical ceiling of a Redmi Note 10 Pro running iOS is looking at the iOS home screen. Wi-Fi, mobile data, and audio don't work, the screen is drawn by the processor at roughly 20 to 30 frames per second, and the first boot takes four to five minutes on the Apple logo.

Anyone tempted to try it should know the install wipes the phone's Android user data, leaves security protections mostly switched off, and that the devs themselves say not to keep anything personal on the device.

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