Is this not your work? If you didn't make it, you should email hn@ycombinator.com so the mods can remove Show HN from the title. This is a great submission, just not a Show HN.
dang 1 days ago [-]
Ok, we've un-show-hn'd it and will leave the submission otherwise intact.
jeswin 1 days ago [-]
This is incredible work. Thanks for letting us know. The really cool thing about this is that it actually works on phones.
TrungNguyen1909's reverse engineering of A13 bionic booted up modern iOS on non apple hardware for the first time. This opened up a viable path to Apple Silicon hackintoshes as well (eventually), and is just inspiring work. That itself was supported by by the work of Martijn de Vos (devos50) on emulating the 1st-gen iPod Touch, winocm on the early 2010s iEmu project for the Apple A4, and the alephsecurity team on the xnu-qemu-arm64 project for virtualizing 64-bit XNU kernels.
I think it continues as Chefkiss inferno and they seem to be close to getting recent iOS to work [3]. I suppose they could make rapid progress with AI now.
I'm surprised Camera works. Even postmarketOS has difficulty with camera on most devices.
simlevesque 1 days ago [-]
Thank you.
sanid 1 days ago [-]
This is going to be fun. There are already replica phones for the flagship phones that are running a shitty android version that has been customized to look like iOS. People need to tripple check now when buying older used iPhone models.
gruez 1 days ago [-]
>Does not work (yet):
>App Store content and Apple ID sign-in (no Secure Enclave; FairPlay daemon exits)
That seems like a huge roadblock, even if were able to resolve all the driver/OS issues.
driverdan 1 days ago [-]
Sounds like a huge win to me. Neither of those should be required. Replace Apple's walled garden with open login and open stores.
alex7o 19 hours ago [-]
Just use the jailbroken store and you get all apps from free from there
mshish 1 days ago [-]
I imagine official support for 3rd party app stores might open up some options for easily installing apps. However, that might require the store adding support for this type of iOS install or a newer version of iOS with 3rd party app store support.
gruez 1 days ago [-]
>I imagine official support for 3rd party app stores might open up some options for easily installing apps
Given you own the OS, that's not an issue. You can make it pre-jailbroken and load whatever third party app store if you want. The bigger issue is that no app store = no "normie" apps like uber or google maps. I suspect most of the stock apps won't work either because they enforce device attestation on the backend endpoints, so it'll be miserable to use. Note in the maps screenshot, there's nothing behind the modal. It's just blank, suggesting it can't load the map tiles. You'd be better off using an android skinned as ios (possibly vibedcoded) than using this mess.
hard_times 17 hours ago [-]
There's several PoCs showcasing Apple Maps loading just fine on X
numpad0 1 days ago [-]
Someone is going to set up an unofficial app store for this and fill it with pirated and malware-ridden apps. Then some companies will be convinced into releasing .ipsw files for "debug and research" purposes and starts taking subscription through those installs. Then Apple will lose choices but to support randomly downloaded .ipsw files on regular iOS devices to avoid becoming the lesser option against those, and we could slowly crawl back to the code freedom we had in 2006. Or this gets DMCA'd in 3 hours and nothing will come of it.
iSnow 19 hours ago [-]
I doubt it, tbh. How many people will install such a HackIOS in the best case, 1000? 10000? There have to be a billion or more iOS users out there, so the pressure on app vendors or Apple will be negligible.
boston_clone 1 days ago [-]
also,
>Does not work (yet)
>- Cellular, Bluetooth
>- Charging under our kernel (the phone only discharges)
ale42 14 hours ago [-]
That's quite blocking for a phone ;-) But this sounds so cool if it's going to work!
fennecbutt 1 days ago [-]
I mean in theory Apple are a company of humans using services offered by other humans to make hardware used by other humans.
What I mean by that is if someone can create a near perfect replica with all the software keys needed and then clone a known serial number or range of serial numbers, when it comes to apple pushing out an OS update, how are they to know which the real devices are and which aren't?
rickdeckard 18 hours ago [-]
> "[..] if someone can create a near perfect replica with all the software keys needed and then clone a known serial number or range of serial numbers [..]"
I think you would need to hack and emulate the whole security enclave, which contains quite a bit of factory-provisioned data IIRC.
dylan604 1 days ago [-]
Didn't the legal battle between Apple and Samsung show that Apple would not be very open to a iPhone clone?
fennecbutt 1 days ago [-]
Are you trying to say that phone clone companies are beholden to laws? Because I can assure you that they are not.
Just like you can still buy fakes rolexes etc lmao.
Even if you disclose to the buyer that it's counterfeit, it's _still_ illegal. You can't just use someone else's name, logo, or protected designs without authorization.
In fact, it's so severe, you can face >= 10 yrs in Federal PMIA prison and owe fines up to $2M — just for the first offense.
dylan604 1 days ago [-]
I'd venture the legal forces that Apple can bring to bear are not in the same ballpark as Rolex. I'd expect Apple to use their influence with US govt to get Customs to stop shipments from coming in. It's not like these devices would be made in the US.
DaSHacka 1 days ago [-]
But they also don't have to be bought exclusively in the US.
fennecbutt 1 days ago [-]
Clones/knock offs are already illegal. Doesn't really stop em. Only technology solutions can, until they're broken as well.
varispeed 1 days ago [-]
They could implement Grapple Store and then clone most popular apps.
zahirbmirza 1 days ago [-]
There was a time that I would have liked iOS to run on other hardware. These days, it is so clunkly, that the the desire is not there.
leoedin 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah, give me the iPhone's hardware running Android please. I switched to iPhone because my Android phones kept dying due to hardware issues. Android has a far better keyboard and notification system. Give me it any day.
trezm 14 hours ago [-]
This is what I want too.
Guillaume86 1 days ago [-]
Can’t wait until someone's decide to tackle
Garmin firmwares updates (porting to older or cheaper models what is purely market segmentation and not hardware limitations).
numlock86 19 hours ago [-]
I don't own any Garmin stuff, but it's just been yesterday that I overheard someone in the office ranting about them, and how they are making a custom firmware for it with Claude right now. Are they really this bad?
Guillaume86 15 hours ago [-]
It's not bad on release, but it's very frustrating how quick they stop porting new features to one gen old models, basically instantly.
6 months after I bough mine (a 965 FR, top of the line, most recent model at the time), they released the new model 970 with new softwares features they won't port to mine...
fxtentacle 19 hours ago [-]
I’m hoping that someone will tackle Garmin entirely by releasing open source replacement devices ..
SoKamil 1 days ago [-]
> It is a research bench, not a ROM: a session lasts a given number of seconds, then the kernel returns to the loader and hands over its log.
I wonder if it is here because Claude would deploy safeguards and not proceed with the project otherwise.
bitpush 1 days ago [-]
> a session lasts a given number of seconds, then the kernel returns to the loader and hands over its log.
What does this? You can only 'use the device' for x seconds before ..shutting down?
ChocolateGod 1 days ago [-]
Sometimes a watch dog, if you don't poke the correct thing regularly the system can think there's been a crash.
nullpoint420 1 days ago [-]
I'm doing the same thing with my Oneplus 6T, I have Claude piloting my phone over adb booting new candidate kernels and checking the results
What a time to be alive!
nmac101 3 hours ago [-]
Is the repo public? I'd love to test that out on my 6T
hard_times 17 hours ago [-]
adb runs in userspace Android. It's not a serial protocol/stack. Maybe fastboot.
nullpoint420 11 hours ago [-]
Yes thanks for the correction, I meant fastboot
drnick1 1 days ago [-]
It's interesting that this can be done, but why would anyone want to run iOS on Android devices? A more desirable outcome would be running a free Android distro like Graphene on Apple hardware. Or indeed just liberating phones controlled by Google by hacking the bootloader and replacing the OS.
Wowfunhappy 1 days ago [-]
One thing that occurs to me is this project is a way to get a fully jailbroken iOS. You can tweak the kernel and go nuts. Can't do that on an iPhone.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 1 days ago [-]
You know damn well that different people like different things. Very Brian Griffin comment.
SOLAR_FIELDS 1 days ago [-]
It’s the quintessential Apple forum response on anything Apple related. Someone posts a legitimate question on some Apple related forum and the stereotypical response from any Apple fanboy is “why would you want to do that? It’s not the Apple (tm) way”
orf 1 days ago [-]
Having been given an android work phone, I can’t understand why anyone would use this willingly.
The desirable outcome for most people doesn’t seem to be the ability to run android on an iPhone, let’s put it that way.
drnick1 1 days ago [-]
> Having been given an android work phone, I can’t understand why anyone would use this willingly.
This is probably a commercial Android distro like Samsung's or Google's, filled with OEM crapware. Pure Android is far better than that and is free (freedom to install apps, inspect the source code, etc.) It's basically a Linux distro for smart phones.
1 days ago [-]
orf 1 days ago [-]
It’s crap, sorry. It’s an inconsistent mess. Having come from iOS it’s as clear as night and day.
It doesn’t really matter to me if there’s some other specific version of Android that fixes some issues if I install it. As a user that’s not something I care about.
drnick1 1 days ago [-]
> Having come from iOS it’s as clear as night and day.
It's odd because, as someone who daily drives a Pixel with GrapheneOS and also owns an iPhone, my experience is the opposite. You could not pay be to go back to a device controlled by a corporation, and on which I am not allowed to run programs without Apple's blessing. The UI is largely a matter of taste, by now all mobile operating systems have converged to a broadly identical design and similar gestures etc.
genxy 1 days ago [-]
You guys are talking about different things.
myaccountonhn 21 hours ago [-]
As a user too, android works far better for me and I was an Apple user for a few years.
Not having the ugly frosted glass thing is a very big plus.
cromka 1 days ago [-]
I use both, iOS for past 10 years and now Android again.
Both are inconsistent mess.
silon42 19 hours ago [-]
Yes, Android is worse in some ways that it was 10 versions ago.
viraptor 16 hours ago [-]
It's what you get used to or what you prefer. I have some issues with how iPhones work and prefer an Android system. But having an Android on a second hand iPhone hardware could be tempting.
wwweston 1 days ago [-]
The most desirable outcome with iPhones is to be able to run an up to date fully-patched iOS on them with up to date apps for as long as the device will function.
The next most desirable outcome is to be able to run another solid/secure/up-to-date mobile OS on them, and it gets more relatively desirable once iOS stops supporting the device.
Klonoar 1 days ago [-]
They don’t come across as an Apple fanboy; they’re just stating they’d rather have the more private OS on the better hardware.
Danox 8 hours ago [-]
They are just wasting time, a better use of their time. Would be taking a license out from Arm for designing processors and building something from the ground up like those three former engineers who worked at Apple who later got paid $1.2 billion for their work by Qualcomm when their company Nuvia was bought out.
nomagicbullet 15 hours ago [-]
The commenter you are responding to asked a perfectly valid question. I found your response and attack to them quite out of place.
ChrisMarshallNY 1 days ago [-]
For that warm feeling you get, when Apple turns their legal lasers on you.
hkt 21 hours ago [-]
The cheapest way to heat your home this winter is to accrue so many cease and desist letters you can use them as fuel!
bijowo1676 1 days ago [-]
to finally have a Blue iMessage bubble in your group texts
gruez 1 days ago [-]
That likely doesn't work because they require device attestation to access imessage. It's what killed beeper mini too.
howunfortunate 1 days ago [-]
Stolen valor!
jeswin 1 days ago [-]
You're on a website called "hacker" news. Inclined to downvote so that this doesn't take up conversation space.
carlosjobim 1 days ago [-]
iOS is the best part of an iPhone, just like MacOS is the best part of a Mac. Android phones are cheaper than iPhones, so why not? The Android hardware is quite nice many times.
dylan604 1 days ago [-]
Is that really true? When Apple came out with the original 2006 MacPro, it was the best computer to run Windows. When the TrashCan came out, there was a specific issue with Resolve that disappeared when booted into Windows. Apple blamed DaVinci, DaVinci blamed Nvidia, Nvidia blamed Apple.
I'm not suggesting I like Windows or anything nonsensical like that, but I'm just suggesting that their hardware is much better than their software.
Danox 8 hours ago [-]
In comparison to who?, because the competition is lagging see the new Surface laptop by Microsoft/Nvidia which is the second or third effort by Microsoft? the previous version with Qualcomm has been a failure, Apple currently has five ecosystems to go with Apple Silicon who is this other company out there that can say the same, is the operating system perfect no is anything in the tech world? It’s iteration over time and never stopping or else you get to join Motorola of Schaumburg, Illinois, or take a backseat like IBM, or Intel.
I wish someone would take out a license with Arm and build a computer using Linux creating a user-friendly computer. After all, it’s been 35 years.
bigyabai 8 hours ago [-]
> I wish someone would take out a license with Arm
Who? Arm can barely sell licenses to their biggest customers. Do you expect smaller businesses to pay for the ISA license, or core IP?
lloeki 1 days ago [-]
The Mac Pro 2013 carried an AMD D300/500/700 GPU, not Nvidia.
dylan604 1 days ago [-]
doh! I so don't think about AMD that I even forget when they are actually used and forget they even exist. But of course it should have felt weird using Apple/Nvidea in the same breath
lloeki 18 hours ago [-]
There were quite a few: the Mac Pro before it (which is why you may be confused) til 2012, iMacs and MacBooks til 2014.
And before that, PowerMacs and PowerBooks.
Then Nvidia got into a feud over Samsung, Qualcomm, and indirectly Apple via PowerVR making their own GPUs so Apple ragequit and gave them the finger, culminating in refusing to sign third-party Nvidia drivers.
viraptor 16 hours ago [-]
That's not been the case for quite a while. Every MacOS release for the last few years results in a choir of "just take a break to fix the bugs". Every new release breaks something about the UX, system crashing bugs are not fixed, old features are restricted and deprecated without replacements (sandbox?), the open sources are published incomplete and impossible to compile, silly user restrictions are in place (want to add a codec or fix the BT stack? lol, not allowed), etc. etc.
MacOS is a practically enforced part of Mac. I'd love to get rid of it because it's not even good.
carlosjobim 16 hours ago [-]
It's easy for you to get rid off MacOS: Buy a different computer.
In relation to the rest of your comment: Yes, MacOS and iOS sucks. All the alternatives suck twice as bad. Which is why somebody might want to upgrade their phone to iOS.
viraptor 1 hours ago [-]
If you're making decisions, it's easy. If the whole company is standardised in their dev environment, you get a MacBook and that's it. Which, to be clear, makes sense in terms of proper fleet management. But I'd love to have a Linux laptop at work instead. (No, Asahi is not an option for managed devices. VMs are also not good enough to use as the main desktop)
Danox 8 hours ago [-]
I would say it’s the combination of iOS, MacOS, and the other three Apple OSs (ecosystems) and Apple Silicon is what puts Apple ahead of Microsoft, AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Google.
mayli 1 days ago [-]
Not really, the hw from apple is much better than android hw, like A18 compare with SG8 or M1 vs x86. the software itself is mostly worst than android.
Danox 8 hours ago [-]
And many would say Microsoft Windows, Android and Linux are well, not that good, someone who remembers all those other vertical computer companies from the 1980s to early 1990s who had a OS to go with in-house hardware and I’m afraid that’s where Apple has the others beat the integration of the two is where it’s at, parasitically hanging off someone else’s hardware, is not going get the job done not against Apple. or anyone else that chooses to go down the same path, and I don’t mean parasitically hanging off someone else’s hardware.
bigyabai 8 hours ago [-]
Those vertical computer companies died for a reason. The Mac is less profitable than Apple's software and service segment, and macOS itself is a minority in every market.
For all the success this strategy found in the mobile market, it's just as fruitless for server\PC as it was in the 1990s.
carlosjobim 1 days ago [-]
I can give you that, but the fact remains that there are no cheap iPhones you can buy, but there are cheap Android phones. If it becomes possible to easily upgrade your cheap Android phone to iOS, then that would be very pleasant for a lot of people.
swiftcoder 18 hours ago [-]
> iOS is the best part of an iPhone, just like MacOS is the best part of a Mac.
This is a very hot take. I think you'll find quite a lot of people are unhappy with the state of the two OSes, while still regarding the hardware as best-in-class
Danox 8 hours ago [-]
Some of the people in the tech crowd may feel that way. In regular person land it’s very hard to beat Apple. A company that designs the OS and the hardware together as one wins out and if it was easy, more companies would have done it over the years.
It certainly is taking a whole bunch of people a lot of time to produce something better and I’m sorry, Windows and Microsoft aren’t it in the mid 80s in the early 90s there were many in some cases, better solutions by several vertical computer companies not saying all of them were better, but you can’t beat designing the operating system and the hardware under one roof again parasitically hanging off someone else’s hardware equals a bad, poorly performing solution.
ezst 19 hours ago [-]
Can't disagree more, but heh :-)
mrheosuper 1 days ago [-]
It's not about we should or not, it's about we could or not
jeswin 18 hours ago [-]
Looking at the comments, I get the feeling that HN has no idea how big this is going to get.
Agents are going to move this project into acceptable usability and performance in 6-12 months, across a broad set of Android phones. You're going to see people loading iOS on $299 phones, with grey zone marketplaces for app packages (like Android has had for ever).
Hackintosh was a small hobbyist community. Phones will be 100x that. There's going to be very little money in it, but I'll be surprised if this doesn't explode.
rickdeckard 18 hours ago [-]
Even if this takes off in some way, the most meaningful result for an end-user would still be to recreate the experience on Android, instead of trying to keep iOS running on foreign hardware.
Reason: Android is a OS designed to run on as much hardware as possible, iOS is designed to support only a VERY limited set of components, and is increasingly wrapped into a per-component security architecture.
jeswin 18 hours ago [-]
I'm saying the hobbyist community for phones is massive - this is not for regular phone users. And they all have older (but fast enough) phones lying around to try something like this on.
rickdeckard 18 hours ago [-]
Yes, I got that.
And I'm saying that it's not trivial to run an OS on any hardware. Android is designed for this and well-documented, which makes it look easier. iOS is neither of those.
jeswin 17 hours ago [-]
I know, but looking at how quickly people got it running on a few other phones (I've seen pixel 1, 4 and 6, a samsung, and another), I'm thinking that codex or claude code is exceptionally good at this class of work.
frumplestlatz 14 hours ago [-]
Do you want to rely on a phone that’s missing a random moving selection of critical features and bricks itself on every update?
dmcrespo 1 days ago [-]
It seems a bit crazy to me, plus now it opens the door to many iPhone copies... we'll have to be very careful
teaearlgraycold 1 days ago [-]
No. We should be very bold.
yangm97 1 days ago [-]
But I wanted to be italic.
tolerance 1 days ago [-]
Heavy is the head.
schrodinger 23 hours ago [-]
Wrong thread, Rolexes are discussed above.
realusername 1 days ago [-]
IPhones copies didn't wait this project, some people already have a full iOS reskin of Android which is very close unless you really know what to look for.
ksicmecidkci 1 days ago [-]
> unless you really know what to look for
I have yet to see a “full iOS reskin of Android” that actually fools anyone with at least one working eye and a normal amount of common sense. These “reskins” are just slightly fancier launchers and they in no conceivable way provide an experience anywhere near close to actual iOS.
realusername 22 hours ago [-]
They absolutely aren't "fancier launchers", they changed absolutely everything, they have the iOS settings, a fake appstore.. have a look on youtube on fake iphones.
nsbdhciebsbdhc 21 hours ago [-]
They qouldnt convincethe average HN user, bur your saying they wouldn't convince my grandma?
torben-friis 1 days ago [-]
I wonder, why 16.5? (That would be 2023's versión).
Not to detract from how awesome this is, just curious.
MBCook 1 days ago [-]
They crank up security every release. Perhaps ones after that were somehow drastically harder?
pmkary 1 days ago [-]
Someone finally did this, wow! 2026 just keeps getting more crazy.
ivanjermakov 1 days ago [-]
Maybe tomorrow we get Android running on the iPhone (and Linux on the iPad please).
UTM was almost good enough but the procedure to enable JIT every time you run it was extremely clunky.
1f60c 1 days ago [-]
There is one, uh, minor drawback:
> Does not work (yet)
>
> Charging under our kernel (the phone only discharges)
xandrius 1 days ago [-]
Single use OS
matneyx 1 days ago [-]
The burningest of burners
lemoncucumber 1 days ago [-]
That would be if "the phone only discharges, all at once"
ttul 1 days ago [-]
Pack it up and go home, everyone. The alpha-release doesn't chart. Time to throw in the towel. /s
ksicmecidkci 1 days ago [-]
Not even /s can save this one, mate. Poor form.
jgbuddy 1 days ago [-]
Next; IOS will be decompiled and open source
xp84 1 days ago [-]
I hope that continued advancements in AI make it impossible for outfits like Apple to maintain closed systems that lock the device owner out of having any control over their own hardware. We're obviously not there yet -- I'm sure 1000 things won't work on a device with this running, but it's going to be a game of cat and mouse, and mouse is moving a lot faster than cat can now.
iSnow 18 hours ago [-]
I have my reservations. The cats can also use AI to make their software less buggy or even formally verified.
If I had to venture a guess it would be that this is the last stand for hackers that are able to root all kinds of older devices, but companies like Apple will shell out the money to prevent this for their next-gen devices.
It's likely that low-cost device makers will not do that, so maybe rooting will still persist for cheap stuff.
mschuster91 1 days ago [-]
> I hope that continued advancements in AI make it impossible for outfits like Apple to maintain closed systems that lock the device owner out of having any control over their own hardware.
Formally verified bootloaders and Secure Boot will make this all but impossible without hardware mods that do voltage glitching. It took 8 years for the checkm8 and usbliter8 exploits to be found, and I think that especially Apple has invested so much money, time and resources into securing their boot chain that the "best" thing we can hope for is a tethered jailbreak allowing a boot into another kernel.
cromka 1 days ago [-]
It's only a matter of finding exploitative bugs, this already happened before in Apple devices precisely.
j16sdiz 1 days ago [-]
one click exploit is fun when you trying to jailbreak your phone; it is a nightmare when a random website do that
mschuster91 20 hours ago [-]
Bugs yes, sure, there will always be bugs. But it already is really, really difficult to get non-privileged code execution access, even harder to achieve tethered root access (i.e. root access that holds until a reboot), and all but impossible to get untethered root access that survives reboots.
compiler-guy 1 days ago [-]
Decompiled and easily available if you know where to look? Sure. Seems likely.
But "Open Source" is a description of the licensing terms, and it ain't gonna be that. Apple will sue hosters into oblivion. It will only be available on pirate sites.
cromka 1 days ago [-]
You can use debugger all you want, legally, then write the spec, then reimplement. You just can't look at the code.
We already have nearly a dozen of Adobe and Autodesk knock off apps.
compiler-guy 1 days ago [-]
Yes. Those are clones or clonish. Not originals. So saying "Autodesk is opensource" isn't correct.
A clone of autodesk may be open source however.
redwall_hp 1 days ago [-]
It's going to be great, between this and the Adobe totally-not-using-any-decompiled-code-wink clones: people are going to get sued into the ground and LLM code is going to become radioactive to corporate lawyers. Especially when they find out that they also routinely spit out GPL code verbatim.
It's going to be hilarious.
Danox 8 hours ago [-]
Why waste the time? Just download Darwin take a license out on arm, like those three Apple engineers get to work.
jrmg 1 days ago [-]
It has an, uh, interesting funding model: “$HACKIOS ON BNB CHAIN
The project has its own community token, live on flap.sh. Each trade carries a 1% fee that supports the team and funds development.”
katzenq 17 hours ago [-]
Is this just accepting crypto donations but with bonus gambling?
HaloZero 1 days ago [-]
If you can get iOS 16.5 to run on Android, how much more is a stretch to move it to Linux?
therepanic 1 days ago [-]
I suppose Anthropic has relaxed its safety checks to such an extent that Claude now agrees to port iOS to Android phones?
Geof25 1 days ago [-]
ISA - iOS subsystem for Android
nickorlow 1 days ago [-]
You mean the Android subsystem for iOS?
ry-gr 12 hours ago [-]
wondering if this project comes pre-jailbroken? i suppose you would have full access to root correct, so there should be a way to add a package manager?
then you could install .ipa and get apps without the app store
hollowonepl 1 days ago [-]
Wow, do I smell the opportunity to have IOS analogy to Graphene OS built on top of such concept?
gruez 1 days ago [-]
No, because iPhones still have locked bootloader, and on an Android phone this Frankenstein of an OS is likely to have worse security than just grapheneos.
lunar_rover 1 days ago [-]
GrapheneOS relies on either having access to full upstream support or being the upstream themselves. You get neither with an unofficial port of iOS. So no there isn't an opportunity here unless your threat model has Apple as the sole attacker.
jgbuddy 1 days ago [-]
amazing, but who is OO SEX GANG
freedomben 1 days ago [-]
my guess is a lot of Java people who refuse to get on the functional train
dj_io 1 days ago [-]
Great work. This is neat kind of like age old there used to be hackintosh for macs. Now for ios. With this do you have access to app store. I think there is a unique identifier that android will lack for it to work.
hard_times 17 hours ago [-]
> kind of like age old there used to be hackintosh for macs
Have you checked out the hackintosh community lately? They have a near fully functional port to Snapdragon now.
Why do these demonstrations all stop at iOS 16? What changed with iOS 17?
LoganDark 1 days ago [-]
Secure Page Table Monitor and Trusted Execution Monitor
davidfekke 13 hours ago [-]
One of the things that is not working is the Cellular.
Isn't have a cell phone that does not work on a cellular network kind of like having a watch that does not tell time?
jrmg 13 hours ago [-]
This is just the ‘full self driving’ sense of ‘running the full firmware’.
runjake 1 days ago [-]
Important to note that a large percentage of the current versions of A and B-tier iOS apps won't run on an iOS this old.
But this is still a big step for research purposes.
aziaziazi 1 days ago [-]
Happy user of 15.8.8 (05/2026) here. Confirm the lack of many apps but still enough for some users:
- maps, google maps, osm clients...
- whatsapp, discord, telegram...
- bank, raintoday, spotify...
- all iOS default apps!
nickorlow 1 days ago [-]
I wonder how they landed on 16.5
busymom0 24 hours ago [-]
iOS developer here. The oldest iOS Apple lets us currently submit apps for is iOS 15. So yea, this version is pretty old for most apps.
tamimio 1 days ago [-]
Should be called phockintosh! I don’t see a use case for it but cool concept
occoder 1 days ago [-]
Maybe iPhake or iPhack?
xchip 1 days ago [-]
The guy who did it is a genius
raybb 1 days ago [-]
Counting down the days until someone gets full linux on old ipads!
nickpeterson 16 hours ago [-]
While we’re burning tokens, can someone please hack the latest Apple TV 4K to run full Mac OS X? At $300 it’s a bit rich for streaming device but for a Mac mini neo I’d bite.
rk06 1 days ago [-]
hmm, if only the reverse could be done. i.e. running android on apple devices. i got an Ipad 8th gen and would love to install lineageOs on it
Danox 7 hours ago [-]
What colossal waste of time? Just get a license for the Arm processor and do the work.
bigyabai 6 hours ago [-]
iPads have ARM-licensed cores, but not Arm processors. No license is needed here.
pyaamb 1 days ago [-]
This is great. Running a virtual OS on your phone is a great way to explore apps without worrying about excess data collection and permissions if done correctly. And iOS apps on android? Brilliant. A few platforms target iOS exclusively or initially due to strategic budgeting.
ksicmecidkci 1 days ago [-]
That’s… not what’s happening here.
pyaamb 1 days ago [-]
ah fair enough. Didn't look close enough. Oh well.
westurner 1 days ago [-]
Does this make it possible to quality control iOS apps without MacOS runners with xcodebuild in CI like GitHub Actions?
Q: Do the iServices like iCloud, App Store, etc work?
A: No, at least not yet. They possibly require something iOS refers to as the “Legacy FairPlay Key Descrambler” AES (hardware) command.
Extremely subtle hint. Well played.
westurner 1 days ago [-]
Is there something like MicroG for Android for iOS?
saagarjha 1 days ago [-]
Hmm. Maybe small iPhone might be easier to revive than we thought!
Velocifyer 1 days ago [-]
Can you make a GSI to run on any Android Phone?
nikharminds 15 hours ago [-]
Is it working fully or have some bugs?
josteink 17 hours ago [-]
Looking back on those screenshots, iOS 16 looks so much better than these modern liquid glass versions.
A nice clean UI, and a very consistent and clean visual hierarchy.
embedding-shape 1 days ago [-]
What, no, why?! Joking but kind of also not, Apple is terrible at software, amazing at hardware, what the people (me) want is the opposite, Android running on Apple hardware :)
cosmic_cheese 1 days ago [-]
Opinions vary quite a bit on that. I imagine the appeal of this is similar to that of hackintoshing: Apple software with the diversity of generic hardware.
Personally speaking as someone who's had to use both platforms in varying capacities in the past decade I do not find myself fond of Android, particularly modern Android. When I booted up an old Android 9 device a few months back I was struck with how much more appeal that version held compared to its contemporary counterpart.
rjh29 21 hours ago [-]
I don't like iOS but you're practically forced to use it for music production - music apps tends to be iOS-only. Being able to run it on a cheap Android tablet would be great.
voidUpdate 18 hours ago [-]
I imagine performance would be spectacularly awful if you tried to run ios music production apps on a cheap android tablet
rjh29 17 hours ago [-]
Many of them are not doing anything complicated, it's just a walled garden. Animoog is from 2011 and Moog Model D is from 2018 for example - iOS-exclusive but any modern Android tablet is going to smoke an iPad from that era.
Fair point iPads have decent specs for the price, but if you already have an Android tablet, it would be nice to not have to buy an extra device.
voidUpdate 17 hours ago [-]
You might be overestimating "cheap" android tablets. A lot of the actually cheap ones I've seen even kind of struggle to run android
simlevesque 1 days ago [-]
Blue bubbles.
TheSkyHasEyes 1 days ago [-]
Not with a locked bootloader, not yet anyway.
wiseowise 1 days ago [-]
> Apple is terrible at software
You can’t write something like that and then follow up with
> what the people (me) want is the opposite, Android running on Apple hardware :)
sheepscreek 1 days ago [-]
Madness. I love it.
Grombobulous 1 days ago [-]
My “AI is ending the world” feelings are definitely going in another direction in the past few weeks with the reverse engineering, jailbreaking, and porting scene.
Microsoft, Google, Oracle, etc, just invested all their money into a technology that will make their software worthless. As Ronald McDonald once said, I’m lovin’ it.
Danox 7 hours ago [-]
So all the experienced people already in the software field can’t use these models to go even further in their designs? I find that hard to believe in short, i think the bar to entry is just gonna go to a higher level.
anthk 1 days ago [-]
If you think about it, home users will get free MIT licensed clones for Adobe/Autodesk/Solidworks and Microsoft. The companies will just get trained people in their homes for almost free and they will happily pay for support for Adobe/MS et all.
- Optimized and ultra-hardened Office for macros and features? Pay.
- CUDA optimized PS -with inline assembly maybe even from Rust- and more, 24/7 support with a huge Adobe asset pack to start with? Pay.
nullpoint420 1 days ago [-]
Bold of you to assume we'll still be using Office and Adobe in a few years. What happens when all the MIT solutions here are just a MCP?
anthk 1 days ago [-]
Ironically these tools have MCP support and there's the whole Artcraft independent tool (yes, equally named) doing almost magic blending everything.
The are similar tools with the same philosophy on reimplementation and design. Oh, and written in Rust too.
So the MIT tools are pretty much ahead.
They can be commanded from either an script done from an user (similar to AppleScript or VBA but for anything) or an MCP.
add-sub-mul-div 1 days ago [-]
Was your prior feeling about AI based on the sum total of its negative externalities for society, or its not having produced enough gimmick software projects?
Grombobulous 1 days ago [-]
My comment as a whole is not meant to be taken this seriously.
croes 1 days ago [-]
I wonder how many if these AI projects have malware?
dmcrespo 1 days ago [-]
That's exactly what I was analyzing. They go viral very quickly, and there's no way to verify if they contain viruses or steal information.
prmoustache 1 days ago [-]
Like viral that everyone browse quickly at the project page, put their most inspired comment on hn, the go to the next news and forget about it.
I don't think there is a lot of people who actually clone the repos and try the stuff.
1 days ago [-]
diimdeep 1 days ago [-]
Hardware is so powerful, that soon we will be able to run anything using anything, if you have access to whatever you need to run, and access is lacking only if it is streaming content from cloud or hardware encrypted.
ghm2180 1 days ago [-]
> It is a research bench, not a ROM: a session lasts a given number of seconds, then the kernel returns to the loader and hands over its log.
I am "disappointed". no AI OS in the boot sector? It should be taking That log and AFKing the next fix man. Also "sorely missing" is a motorized rig controlling any hardkey presses for reboot and volume etc, because its not real AFK without that.
CmmonCommon 2026!
sohrob 23 hours ago [-]
Now do NixOS on an old iPhone or Android device.
ost-ing 1 days ago [-]
Wow
mossgate 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
akung8x8 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
zarmin 1 days ago [-]
Amazing. On par with cutting off my leg before playing soccer.
unatechie 1 days ago [-]
cool, but probably better to place your time and energy into a more applicable use.
biosboiii 19 hours ago [-]
Nice project, checks notes .. oosexgang (◠‿◠)
LetsGetTechnicl 1 days ago [-]
I'm getting exhausted from all these AI vibe coded projects. Like this is cool, sure, but it's less cool than if someone had figured out how to do it themselves instead of having Claude do it. It's like chasing the dragon but for coding projects.
dudisubekti 1 days ago [-]
You are free to become "more cool" yourself
esseph 1 days ago [-]
Different goals and motivations.
You chase the dragon by figuring out the problems over potentially a long period of time.
They are figuring out the problems and releasing various levels of POCs in a fraction of the time. It may not all be correct, but with how quick it is, there is plenty of time for refactoring if necessary.
bigyabai 1 days ago [-]
> it's less cool than if someone had figured out how to do it themselves
Those people had 4 years to reverse-engineer iOS 16 on their own terms. I don't think there was any overwhelming technical motivation to spend time on a project like this.
But it's quite impressive that it works on QEMU, POCO X5 Pro 5G and some Xiaomi devices too.
Website is here: https://hackios-web.vercel.app/en
Source Code: https://github.com/oosexgang/hackios-xnu-kernel
TrungNguyen1909's reverse engineering of A13 bionic booted up modern iOS on non apple hardware for the first time. This opened up a viable path to Apple Silicon hackintoshes as well (eventually), and is just inspiring work. That itself was supported by by the work of Martijn de Vos (devos50) on emulating the 1st-gen iPod Touch, winocm on the early 2010s iEmu project for the Apple A4, and the alephsecurity team on the xnu-qemu-arm64 project for virtualizing 64-bit XNU kernels.
I think it continues as Chefkiss inferno and they seem to be close to getting recent iOS to work [3]. I suppose they could make rapid progress with AI now.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBeIW2PDFVk&t=286s
[2]: https://github.com/TrungNguyen1909/qemu-t8030
[3] https://github.com/ChefKissInc/Inferno
>App Store content and Apple ID sign-in (no Secure Enclave; FairPlay daemon exits)
That seems like a huge roadblock, even if were able to resolve all the driver/OS issues.
Given you own the OS, that's not an issue. You can make it pre-jailbroken and load whatever third party app store if you want. The bigger issue is that no app store = no "normie" apps like uber or google maps. I suspect most of the stock apps won't work either because they enforce device attestation on the backend endpoints, so it'll be miserable to use. Note in the maps screenshot, there's nothing behind the modal. It's just blank, suggesting it can't load the map tiles. You'd be better off using an android skinned as ios (possibly vibedcoded) than using this mess.
>Does not work (yet)
>- Cellular, Bluetooth
>- Charging under our kernel (the phone only discharges)
What I mean by that is if someone can create a near perfect replica with all the software keys needed and then clone a known serial number or range of serial numbers, when it comes to apple pushing out an OS update, how are they to know which the real devices are and which aren't?
I think you would need to hack and emulate the whole security enclave, which contains quite a bit of factory-provisioned data IIRC.
Just like you can still buy fakes rolexes etc lmao.
Even if you disclose to the buyer that it's counterfeit, it's _still_ illegal. You can't just use someone else's name, logo, or protected designs without authorization.
In fact, it's so severe, you can face >= 10 yrs in Federal PMIA prison and owe fines up to $2M — just for the first offense.
6 months after I bough mine (a 965 FR, top of the line, most recent model at the time), they released the new model 970 with new softwares features they won't port to mine...
I wonder if it is here because Claude would deploy safeguards and not proceed with the project otherwise.
What does this? You can only 'use the device' for x seconds before ..shutting down?
What a time to be alive!
The desirable outcome for most people doesn’t seem to be the ability to run android on an iPhone, let’s put it that way.
This is probably a commercial Android distro like Samsung's or Google's, filled with OEM crapware. Pure Android is far better than that and is free (freedom to install apps, inspect the source code, etc.) It's basically a Linux distro for smart phones.
It doesn’t really matter to me if there’s some other specific version of Android that fixes some issues if I install it. As a user that’s not something I care about.
It's odd because, as someone who daily drives a Pixel with GrapheneOS and also owns an iPhone, my experience is the opposite. You could not pay be to go back to a device controlled by a corporation, and on which I am not allowed to run programs without Apple's blessing. The UI is largely a matter of taste, by now all mobile operating systems have converged to a broadly identical design and similar gestures etc.
Not having the ugly frosted glass thing is a very big plus.
Both are inconsistent mess.
The next most desirable outcome is to be able to run another solid/secure/up-to-date mobile OS on them, and it gets more relatively desirable once iOS stops supporting the device.
I'm not suggesting I like Windows or anything nonsensical like that, but I'm just suggesting that their hardware is much better than their software.
I wish someone would take out a license with Arm and build a computer using Linux creating a user-friendly computer. After all, it’s been 35 years.
Who? Arm can barely sell licenses to their biggest customers. Do you expect smaller businesses to pay for the ISA license, or core IP?
And before that, PowerMacs and PowerBooks.
Then Nvidia got into a feud over Samsung, Qualcomm, and indirectly Apple via PowerVR making their own GPUs so Apple ragequit and gave them the finger, culminating in refusing to sign third-party Nvidia drivers.
MacOS is a practically enforced part of Mac. I'd love to get rid of it because it's not even good.
In relation to the rest of your comment: Yes, MacOS and iOS sucks. All the alternatives suck twice as bad. Which is why somebody might want to upgrade their phone to iOS.
For all the success this strategy found in the mobile market, it's just as fruitless for server\PC as it was in the 1990s.
This is a very hot take. I think you'll find quite a lot of people are unhappy with the state of the two OSes, while still regarding the hardware as best-in-class
It certainly is taking a whole bunch of people a lot of time to produce something better and I’m sorry, Windows and Microsoft aren’t it in the mid 80s in the early 90s there were many in some cases, better solutions by several vertical computer companies not saying all of them were better, but you can’t beat designing the operating system and the hardware under one roof again parasitically hanging off someone else’s hardware equals a bad, poorly performing solution.
Agents are going to move this project into acceptable usability and performance in 6-12 months, across a broad set of Android phones. You're going to see people loading iOS on $299 phones, with grey zone marketplaces for app packages (like Android has had for ever).
Hackintosh was a small hobbyist community. Phones will be 100x that. There's going to be very little money in it, but I'll be surprised if this doesn't explode.
Reason: Android is a OS designed to run on as much hardware as possible, iOS is designed to support only a VERY limited set of components, and is increasingly wrapped into a per-component security architecture.
And I'm saying that it's not trivial to run an OS on any hardware. Android is designed for this and well-documented, which makes it look easier. iOS is neither of those.
I have yet to see a “full iOS reskin of Android” that actually fools anyone with at least one working eye and a normal amount of common sense. These “reskins” are just slightly fancier launchers and they in no conceivable way provide an experience anywhere near close to actual iOS.
Not to detract from how awesome this is, just curious.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172883
If I had to venture a guess it would be that this is the last stand for hackers that are able to root all kinds of older devices, but companies like Apple will shell out the money to prevent this for their next-gen devices.
It's likely that low-cost device makers will not do that, so maybe rooting will still persist for cheap stuff.
Formally verified bootloaders and Secure Boot will make this all but impossible without hardware mods that do voltage glitching. It took 8 years for the checkm8 and usbliter8 exploits to be found, and I think that especially Apple has invested so much money, time and resources into securing their boot chain that the "best" thing we can hope for is a tethered jailbreak allowing a boot into another kernel.
But "Open Source" is a description of the licensing terms, and it ain't gonna be that. Apple will sue hosters into oblivion. It will only be available on pirate sites.
We already have nearly a dozen of Adobe and Autodesk knock off apps.
A clone of autodesk may be open source however.
It's going to be hilarious.
then you could install .ipa and get apps without the app store
Have you checked out the hackintosh community lately? They have a near fully functional port to Snapdragon now.
https://github.com/Snapintosh/Snapintosh
Isn't have a cell phone that does not work on a cellular network kind of like having a watch that does not tell time?
But this is still a big step for research purposes.
Q: Do the iServices like iCloud, App Store, etc work? A: No, at least not yet. They possibly require something iOS refers to as the “Legacy FairPlay Key Descrambler” AES (hardware) command.
Extremely subtle hint. Well played.
A nice clean UI, and a very consistent and clean visual hierarchy.
Personally speaking as someone who's had to use both platforms in varying capacities in the past decade I do not find myself fond of Android, particularly modern Android. When I booted up an old Android 9 device a few months back I was struck with how much more appeal that version held compared to its contemporary counterpart.
Fair point iPads have decent specs for the price, but if you already have an Android tablet, it would be nice to not have to buy an extra device.
You can’t write something like that and then follow up with
> what the people (me) want is the opposite, Android running on Apple hardware :)
Microsoft, Google, Oracle, etc, just invested all their money into a technology that will make their software worthless. As Ronald McDonald once said, I’m lovin’ it.
- Optimized and ultra-hardened Office for macros and features? Pay.
- CUDA optimized PS -with inline assembly maybe even from Rust- and more, 24/7 support with a huge Adobe asset pack to start with? Pay.
The are similar tools with the same philosophy on reimplementation and design. Oh, and written in Rust too. So the MIT tools are pretty much ahead.
They can be commanded from either an script done from an user (similar to AppleScript or VBA but for anything) or an MCP.
I don't think there is a lot of people who actually clone the repos and try the stuff.
I am "disappointed". no AI OS in the boot sector? It should be taking That log and AFKing the next fix man. Also "sorely missing" is a motorized rig controlling any hardkey presses for reboot and volume etc, because its not real AFK without that.
CmmonCommon 2026!
You chase the dragon by figuring out the problems over potentially a long period of time.
They are figuring out the problems and releasing various levels of POCs in a fraction of the time. It may not all be correct, but with how quick it is, there is plenty of time for refactoring if necessary.
Those people had 4 years to reverse-engineer iOS 16 on their own terms. I don't think there was any overwhelming technical motivation to spend time on a project like this.