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semolino 4 hours ago [-]
Are those tubal ligation scars on the mascot?
dpacmittal 4 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised Camera works. Even postmarketOS has difficulty with camera on most devices.
simlevesque 4 hours ago [-]
Thank you.
drnick1 3 hours 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.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 16 minutes ago [-]
You know damn well that different people like different things. Very Brian Griffin comment.
ChrisMarshallNY 2 hours ago [-]
For that warm feeling you get, when Apple turns their legal lasers on you.
Wowfunhappy 1 hours 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.
bijowo1676 3 hours ago [-]
to finally have a Blue iMessage bubble in your group texts
gruez 3 hours ago [-]
That likely doesn't work because they require device attestation to access imessage. It's what killed beeper mini too.
carlosjobim 21 minutes 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.
zahirbmirza 1 hours 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.
dmcrespo 2 hours 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 17 minutes ago [-]
No. We should be very bold.
sanid 4 hours 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 4 hours 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.
mshish 4 hours 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 4 hours 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.
boston_clone 3 hours ago [-]
also,
>Does not work (yet)
>- Cellular, Bluetooth
>- Charging under our kernel (the phone only discharges)
pmkary 4 hours ago [-]
Someone finally did this, wow! 2026 just keeps getting more crazy.
nullpoint420 4 hours 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!
torben-friis 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder, why 16.5? (That would be 2023's versión).
Not to detract from how awesome this is, just curious.
MBCook 4 hours ago [-]
They crank up security every release. Perhaps ones after that were somehow drastically harder?
runjake 2 hours 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 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder how they landed on 16.5
therepanic 2 hours 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 hours ago [-]
ISA - iOS subsystem for Android
nickorlow 1 hours ago [-]
You mean the Android subsystem for iOS?
1f60c 3 hours ago [-]
There is one, uh, minor drawback:
> Does not work (yet)
>
> Charging under our kernel (the phone only discharges)
xandrius 3 hours ago [-]
Single use OS
matneyx 3 hours ago [-]
The burningest of burners
lemoncucumber 2 minutes ago [-]
That would be if "the phone only discharges, all at once"
ttul 3 hours ago [-]
Pack it up and go home, everyone. The alpha-release doesn't chart. Time to throw in the towel. /s
jgbuddy 4 hours ago [-]
Next; IOS will be decompiled and open source
xp84 4 hours 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.
mschuster91 3 hours 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.
compiler-guy 4 hours 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.
bigwheels 4 hours ago [-]
Why do these demonstrations all stop at iOS 16? What changed with iOS 17?
LoganDark 2 hours ago [-]
Secure Page Table Monitor and Trusted Execution Monitor
dj_io 4 hours 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.
tamimio 2 hours ago [-]
Should be called phockintosh! I don’t see a use case for it but cool concept
xchip 2 hours ago [-]
The guy who did it is a genius
jrmg 2 hours 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.”
hollowonepl 4 hours ago [-]
Wow, do I smell the opportunity to have IOS analogy to Graphene OS built on top of such concept?
gruez 4 hours 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.
jgbuddy 4 hours ago [-]
amazing, but who is OO SEX GANG
freedomben 4 hours ago [-]
my guess is a lot of Java people who refuse to get on the functional train
saagarjha 4 hours ago [-]
Hmm. Maybe small iPhone might be easier to revive than we thought!
westurner 4 hours 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.
Velocifyer 4 hours ago [-]
Can you make a GSI to run on any Android Phone?
embedding-shape 4 hours 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 3 hours 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.
wiseowise 1 hours 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 :)
TheSkyHasEyes 4 hours ago [-]
Not with a locked bootloader, not yet anyway.
simlevesque 4 hours ago [-]
Blue bubbles.
croes 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder how many if these AI projects have malware?
dmcrespo 2 hours 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.
3 hours ago [-]
diimdeep 4 hours 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.
ost-ing 2 hours ago [-]
Wow
zarmin 3 hours ago [-]
Amazing. On par with cutting off my leg before playing soccer.
sheepscreek 5 hours ago [-]
Madness. I love it.
Grombobulous 4 hours 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.
add-sub-mul-div 4 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
My comment as a whole is not meant to be taken this seriously.
anthk 4 hours 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 2 hours 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 22 minutes 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.
mossgate 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
akung8x8 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
LetsGetTechnicl 2 hours 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 hours ago [-]
You are free to become "more cool" yourself
esseph 1 hours 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 hours 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.
ramon156 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 20:41:39 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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
>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 a time to be alive!
Not to detract from how awesome this is, just curious.
But this is still a big step for research purposes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.