I found the website to be quite nauseating to look at, so I decided to use the GitHub link instead.<p>But it's quite impressive that it works on QEMU, POCO X5 Pro 5G and some Xiaomi devices too.<p>Website is here: <a href="https://hackios-web.vercel.app/en" rel="nofollow">https://hackios-web.vercel.app/en</a><p>Source Code: <a href="https://github.com/oosexgang/hackios-xnu-kernel" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oosexgang/hackios-xnu-kernel</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBeIW2PDFVk&t=286s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBeIW2PDFVk&t=286s</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/TrungNguyen1909/qemu-t8030" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/TrungNguyen1909/qemu-t8030</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/ChefKissInc/Inferno" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ChefKissInc/Inferno</a>
Are those tubal ligation scars on the mascot?
I'm surprised Camera works. Even postmarketOS has difficulty with camera on most devices.
Thank you.
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.
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.<p>I wonder if it is here because Claude would deploy safeguards and not proceed with the project otherwise.
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<p>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.
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.
For that warm feeling you get, when Apple turns their legal lasers on you.
to finally have a Blue iMessage bubble in your group texts
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.<p>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.
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.
It's not about we should or not, it's about we could or not
You're on a website called "hacker" news. Inclined to downvote so that this doesn't take up conversation space.
Someone finally did this, wow! 2026 just keeps getting more crazy.
I wonder, why 16.5? (That would be 2023's versión).<p>Not to detract from how awesome this is, just curious.
If you can get iOS 16.5 to run on Android, how much more is a stretch to move it to Linux?
Maybe tomorrow we get Android running on the iPhone (and Linux on the iPad please).
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
There is one, uh, <i>minor</i> drawback:<p><pre><code> > Does not work (yet)
>
> Charging under our kernel (the phone only discharges)</code></pre>
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.<p>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.
Decompiled and easily available if you know where to look? Sure. Seems likely.<p>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.<p>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.<p>We already have nearly a dozen of Adobe and Autodesk knock off apps.
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, <i>interesting</i> 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.”
Counting down the days until someone gets full linux on old ipads!
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.<p>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!
I wonder how they landed on 16.5
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.
Why do these demonstrations all stop at iOS 16? What changed with iOS 17?
Should be called phockintosh! I don’t see a use case for it but cool concept
Now do NixOS on an old iPhone or Android device.
amazing, but who is OO SEX GANG
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?
Hmm. Maybe small iPhone might be easier to revive than we thought!
Can you make a GSI to run on any Android Phone?
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 :)
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.<p>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 <i>modern</i> 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.
Blue bubbles.
Not with a locked bootloader, not yet anyway.
> Apple is terrible at software<p>You can’t write something like that and then follow up with<p>> 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.<p>Microsoft, Google, Oracle, etc, just invested all their money into a technology that will make their software worthless. As Ronald McDonald once said, <i>I’m lovin’ it.</i>
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.<p>- Optimized and ultra-hardened Office for macros and features? Pay.<p>- CUDA optimized PS -with inline assembly maybe even from Rust- and more, 24/7 support with a <i>huge</i> Adobe asset pack to start with? Pay.
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.<p>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.<p>CmmonCommon 2026!
I wonder how many if these AI projects have malware?
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.
Wow
Amazing. On par with cutting off my leg before playing soccer.
[flagged]
[dead]
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.
You are free to become "more cool" yourself
Different goals and motivations.<p>You chase the dragon by figuring out the problems over potentially a long period of time.<p>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<p>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.
[dead]