Over the years we’ve seen a thousand and one examples of modders trying to run iOS on Android phones and vice versa. These were projects that mostly ended up in vain, but in a context where generative AI exists (and a lot of free time), now a wave of fans has gotten to work with pretty amazing results.
Social networks are filled with videos where users have managed to run iOS on Android. A clip of iOS 16 on Redmi Note 12 is one of the ones that has got us talking the most these days. We tell you how they did it.
Technological milestones. iOS is designed to run only on Apple hardware, as you probably know. There are previous projects to do just the opposite: run Android on an iPhone. They include iDroid, which was the first to boot Android on iPhones in 2010, and later Project Sandcastle, which did the same with Android 10 on iPhones using Apple’s AIO chip. So far, no one has been able to reverse this.
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How it works. Known as “Hackios” and inspired by the Hackintosh scene (MacOS on non-Apple PCs), this movement can be found in an open source project on GitHub called ios-sweet. It replaces the Linux kernel that Android phones typically use with XNU, the kernel that Apple uses in its own devices. A core is the center of an operating system, essentially a layer that allows software to interact with chips, memory, and storage. The good thing is that Apple publicly releases the XNU source code, which is why there are so many experiments.
Specifically, ios-sweet provides XNU with a device tree copied from an iPhone X A device tree is like a description of the hardware it runs on In this case, when you give it the device tree of an iPhone X, the kernel thinks it’s booting an iPhone. The unmodified iOS 16 files are then loaded from an iPhone X running the Android mobile chip.
Why the iPhone? According to Android Authority, the project’s developers chose it because it’s a required security feature since the iPhone X, the last iPhone without Pointer Authentication (PAC). Qualcomm chips like the Redmi Note 10 Pro don’t support PAC, so the new iPhone software won’t boot. So this same method probably won’t work on more modern phones.
What works and what doesn’t. It is still not an operating system that makes a mobile phone “usable” because there are still several components that do not work. In the case of the Redmi Note 10 Pro, it reaches the lock screen, home screen, control and settings center, and the touch input and physical buttons are responsive. But wifi, bluetooth and mobile data don’t work. Audio, camera and biometric sensors also do not work. Additionally, some system apps such as Messages, Phone or Photos only show a black screen.
There is no graphics driver, so the system draws the screen at about 20-30 frames per second. According to Decrypt, it takes 4 to 5 minutes for mobile to boot on this system.
Compatible phone. Apart from the Redmi Note 10 Pro, there are also adapted versions for the Redmi Note 12 Pro and the LG V60, according to Android Authority. Developers are also working on the OnePlus 7T, Redmi 5 Plus and Galaxy S23 Ultra, although the code is not yet public at the moment. Also tried with a Google Pixel 6 (with a Tensor chip) and a Galaxy S7 (with Exynos 8890), but no luck so far.
The good news is that the developer responsible for adapting the hack to the Redmi Note 12 claims that sound, WiFi and wallpaper are working, but the system is still apparently very unstable. From Decrypt they also noted an independent group, OOSexGang, that claims to be running iOS 16.5 on a Poco X5 Pro, publishing the project on Github.
A.I. Most of these adaptations rely on content assisted by generative AI, since the NOTES.md file in the repository includes instructions for AI agents such as Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex or Gemini. The speed at which agents can deploy software is much faster, which is why we’re seeing crazier projects lately. Even in video games, where hundreds of decompilations of games have been released over the past few months in environments and consoles very different from their original intent.
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