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Show HN: Run full iOS 16.5 firmware on Android Devices

196 points aghuang 4 hours ago 70 comments

sheepscreek 3 hours ago | parent

Madness. I love it.

Grombobulous 3 hours ago | parent

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.

add-sub-mul-div 3 hours ago | parent

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 2 hours ago | parent

My comment as a whole is not meant to be taken this seriously.

anthk 2 hours ago | parent

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 hour ago | parent

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?

jgbuddy 3 hours ago | parent

amazing, but who is OO SEX GANG

freedomben 3 hours ago | parent

my guess is a lot of Java people who refuse to get on the functional train

hollowonepl 3 hours ago | parent

Wow, do I smell the opportunity to have IOS analogy to Graphene OS built on top of such concept?

gruez 3 hours ago | parent

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.

nullpoint420 3 hours ago | parent

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!

torben-friis 3 hours ago | parent

I wonder, why 16.5? (That would be 2023's versión).

Not to detract from how awesome this is, just curious.

MBCook 2 hours ago | parent

They crank up security every release. Perhaps ones after that were somehow drastically harder?

westurner 3 hours ago | parent

Does this make it possible to quality control iOS apps without MacOS runners with xcodebuild in CI like GitHub Actions?

hard_times 2 hours ago | parent

https://chefkiss.dev/applehax/inferno/

ttul 2 hours ago | parent

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.

sanid 3 hours ago | parent

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 3 hours ago | parent

>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.

mshish 2 hours ago | parent

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 2 hours ago | parent

>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.

boston_clone 2 hours ago | parent

also,

>Does not work (yet)

>- Cellular, Bluetooth

>- Charging under our kernel (the phone only discharges)

embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent

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 :)

TheSkyHasEyes 3 hours ago | parent

Not with a locked bootloader, not yet anyway.

simlevesque 3 hours ago | parent

Blue bubbles.

cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago | parent

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.

wiseowise 22 minutes ago | parent

> 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 :)

aghuang 3 hours ago | parent

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

semolino 3 hours ago | parent

Are those tubal ligation scars on the mascot?

simlevesque 3 hours ago | parent

Thank you.

dpacmittal 2 hours ago | parent

I'm surprised Camera works. Even postmarketOS has difficulty with camera on most devices.

Wowfunhappy 28 minutes ago | parent

Is this not your work? If it's not yours, you should email the mods (footer contact link) so they can remove Show HN from the title. This is a great submission, just not a Show HN.

pmkary 3 hours ago | parent

Someone finally did this, wow! 2026 just keeps getting more crazy.

jgbuddy 3 hours ago | parent

Next; IOS will be decompiled and open source

xp84 2 hours ago | parent

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.

mschuster91 2 hours ago | parent

> 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.

compiler-guy 2 hours ago | parent

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.

saagarjha 3 hours ago | parent

Hmm. Maybe small iPhone might be easier to revive than we thought!

dj_io 3 hours ago | parent

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.

bigwheels 2 hours ago | parent

Why do these demonstrations all stop at iOS 16? What changed with iOS 17?

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

Secure Page Table Monitor and Trusted Execution Monitor

diimdeep 2 hours ago | parent

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.

Velocifyer 2 hours ago | parent

Can you make a GSI to run on any Android Phone?

1f60c 2 hours ago | parent

There is one, uh, minor drawback:

  > Does not work (yet)
  >
  > Charging under our kernel (the phone only discharges)

xandrius 2 hours ago | parent

Single use OS

matneyx 2 hours ago | parent

The burningest of burners

ttul 2 hours ago | parent

Pack it up and go home, everyone. The alpha-release doesn't chart. Time to throw in the towel. /s

drnick1 2 hours ago | parent

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.

bijowo1676 1 hour ago | parent

to finally have a Blue iMessage bubble in your group texts

gruez 1 hour ago | parent

That likely doesn't work because they require device attestation to access imessage. It's what killed beeper mini too.

ChrisMarshallNY 1 hour ago | parent

For that warm feeling you get, when Apple turns their legal lasers on you.

Wowfunhappy 34 minutes ago | parent

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.

zarmin 1 hour ago | parent

Amazing. On par with cutting off my leg before playing soccer.

jrmg 1 hour ago | parent

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.”

croes 1 hour ago | parent

I wonder how many if these AI projects have malware?

dmcrespo 1 hour ago | parent

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.

ost-ing 1 hour ago | parent

Wow

dmcrespo 1 hour ago | parent

It seems a bit crazy to me, plus now it opens the door to many iPhone copies... we'll have to be very careful

tamimio 57 minutes ago | parent

Should be called phockintosh! I don’t see a use case for it but cool concept

xchip 56 minutes ago | parent

The guy who did it is a genius

therepanic 47 minutes ago | parent

I suppose Anthropic has relaxed its safety checks to such an extent that Claude now agrees to port iOS to Android phones?

Geof25 35 minutes ago | parent

ISA - iOS subsystem for Android

nickorlow 31 minutes ago | parent

You mean the Android subsystem for iOS?

runjake 40 minutes ago | parent

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.

nickorlow 37 minutes ago | parent

I wonder how they landed on 16.5

aziaziazi 29 minutes ago | parent

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!

LetsGetTechnicl 36 minutes ago | parent

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.

bigyabai 23 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

esseph 18 minutes ago | parent

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.

dudisubekti 16 minutes ago | parent

You are free to become "more cool" yourself

zahirbmirza 18 minutes ago | parent

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.