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.
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.
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 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?
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'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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.”
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Ok, we've un-show-hn'd it and will leave the submission otherwise intact.
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
[2]: https://github.com/TrungNguyen1909/qemu-t8030
[3] https://github.com/ChefKissInc/Inferno
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.
>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.
2 replies →
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?
6 replies →
They could implement Grapple Store and then clone most popular apps.
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”
10 replies →
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.
Stolen valor!
You're on a website called "hacker" news. Inclined to downvote so that this doesn't take up conversation space.
It's not about we should or not, it's about we could or not
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.
2 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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.
But I wanted to be italic.
2 replies →
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.
2 replies →
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?
Someone finally did this, wow! 2026 just keeps getting more crazy.
Maybe tomorrow we get Android running on the iPhone (and Linux on the iPad please).
> and Linux on the iPad please
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172883
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:
Single use OS
The burningest of burners
1 reply →
Pack it up and go home, everyone. The alpha-release doesn't chart. Time to throw in the towel. /s
Not even /s can save this one, mate. Poor form.
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.
3 replies →
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.
1 reply →
I suppose Anthropic has relaxed its safety checks to such an extent that Claude now agrees to port iOS to Android phones?
ISA - iOS subsystem for Android
You mean the Android subsystem for iOS?
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.
Counting down the days until someone gets full linux on old ipads!
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.
Why do these demonstrations all stop at iOS 16? What changed with iOS 17?
Secure Page Table Monitor and Trusted Execution Monitor
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!
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.
Should be called phockintosh! I don’t see a use case for it but cool concept
Maybe iPhake or iPhack?
The guy who did it is a genius
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.
That’s… not what’s happening here.
ah fair enough. Didn't look close enough. Oh well.
Does this make it possible to quality control iOS apps without MacOS runners with xcodebuild in CI like GitHub Actions?
https://chefkiss.dev/applehax/inferno/
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.
1 reply →
Hmm. Maybe small iPhone might be easier to revive than we thought!
Can you make a GSI to run on any Android Phone?
Now do NixOS on an old iPhone or Android device.
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.
Blue bubbles.
Not with a locked bootloader, not yet anyway.
> 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.
2 replies →
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?
1 reply →
> 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.
Wow
Amazing. On par with cutting off my leg before playing soccer.
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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.
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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