Run full iOS 16.5 firmware on Android Devices
github.com414 points by aghuang 17 hours ago
414 points by aghuang 17 hours ago
https://hackios-web.vercel.app/en
I found the website to be quite nauseating to look at, so I decided to use the GitHub link instead. 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 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. 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. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBeIW2PDFVk&t=286s I'm surprised Camera works. Even postmarketOS has difficulty with camera on most devices. 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. >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. Sounds like a huge win to me. Neither of those should be required. Replace Apple's walled garden with open login and open stores. 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. >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. 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. also, >Does not work (yet) >- Cellular, Bluetooth >- Charging under our kernel (the phone only discharges) 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? Didn't the legal battle between Apple and Samsung show that Apple would not be very open to a iPhone clone? 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. It is definitely not legal to sell counterfeit goods, including imitation Rolex watches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_Counterfeiting_Act_o... 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. 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. Clones/knock offs are already illegal. Doesn't really stop em. Only technology solutions can, until they're broken as well. 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). > 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. > 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? Sometimes a watch dog, if you don't poke the correct thing regularly the system can think there's been a crash. 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. 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. You know damn well that different people like different things. Very Brian Griffin comment. 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” 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. > 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. 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. > 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. 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. I use both, iOS for past 10 years and now Android again. Both are inconsistent mess. 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. 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. For that warm feeling you get, when Apple turns their legal lasers on you. The cheapest way to heat your home this winter is to accrue so many cease and desist letters you can use them as fuel! to finally have a Blue iMessage bubble in your group texts That likely doesn't work because they require device attestation to access imessage. It's what killed beeper mini too. You're on a website called "hacker" news. Inclined to downvote so that this doesn't take up conversation space. 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. 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. The Mac Pro 2013 carried an AMD D300/500/700 GPU, not Nvidia. 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 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. 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. 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. 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! It seems a bit crazy to me, plus now it opens the door to many iPhone copies... we'll have to be very careful No. We should be very bold. 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. > 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. They qouldnt convincethe average HN user, bur your saying they wouldn't convince my grandma? 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. I wonder, why 16.5? (That would be 2023's versión). Not to detract from how awesome this is, just curious. They crank up security every release. Perhaps ones after that were somehow drastically harder? Maybe tomorrow we get Android running on the iPhone (and Linux on the iPad please). > 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. If you can get iOS 16.5 to run on Android, how much more is a stretch to move it to Linux? There is one, uh, minor drawback: Pack it up and go home, everyone. The alpha-release doesn't chart. Time to throw in the towel. /s Next; IOS will be decompiled and open source 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. > 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. It's only a matter of finding exploitative bugs, this already happened before in Apple devices precisely. 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. one click exploit is fun when you trying to jailbreak your phone; it is a nightmare when a random website do that 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. 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. 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. 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. I suppose Anthropic has relaxed its safety checks to such an extent that Claude now agrees to port iOS to Android phones? 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.” 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 Wow, do I smell the opportunity to have IOS analogy to Graphene OS built on top of such concept? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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! 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. amazing, but who is OO SEX GANG my guess is a lot of Java people who refuse to get on the functional train 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. Does this make it possible to quality control iOS apps without MacOS runners with xcodebuild in CI like GitHub Actions? From the site: 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. 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 :) 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. 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. > 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 :) Madness. I love it. 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. 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. 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? 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. 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? > 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! I wonder how many if these AI projects have malware? 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. 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. 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. cool, but probably better to place your time and energy into a more applicable use. 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. 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. > 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.
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> Does not work (yet)
>
> Charging under our kernel (the phone only discharges)
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