Show HN: Run full iOS 16.5 firmware on Android Devices

(github.com)

100 points | by aghuang 2 hours ago

17 comments

  • aghuang 1 hour ago
    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 1 hour ago
      Are those tubal ligation scars on the mascot?
    • dpacmittal 39 minutes ago
      I'm surprised Camera works. Even postmarketOS has difficulty with camera on most devices.
    • simlevesque 56 minutes ago
      Thank you.
  • pmkary 59 minutes ago
    Someone finally did this, wow! 2026 just keeps getting more crazy.
  • sanid 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 39 minutes 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 35 minutes 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.

  • torben-friis 1 hour ago
    I wonder, why 16.5? (That would be 2023's versión).

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

    • MBCook 44 minutes ago
      They crank up security every release. Perhaps ones after that were somehow drastically harder?
  • bigwheels 42 minutes ago
    Why do these demonstrations all stop at iOS 16? What changed with iOS 17?
  • dj_io 55 minutes 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.
  • 1f60c 24 minutes ago
    There is one, uh, minor drawback:

      > Does not work (yet)
      >
      > Charging under our kernel (the phone only discharges)
    • ttul 1 minute ago
      Pack it up and go home, everyone. The alpha-release doesn't chart. Time to throw in the towel. /s
    • xandrius 2 minutes ago
      Single use OS
  • Velocifyer 34 minutes ago
    Can you make a GSI to run on any Android Phone?
  • nullpoint420 1 hour 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!

  • saagarjha 55 minutes ago
    Hmm. Maybe small iPhone might be easier to revive than we thought!
  • hollowonepl 1 hour ago
    Wow, do I smell the opportunity to have IOS analogy to Graphene OS built on top of such concept?
    • gruez 1 hour 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.
  • embedding-shape 1 hour 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 24 minutes 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.

    • TheSkyHasEyes 1 hour ago
      Not with a locked bootloader, not yet anyway.
    • simlevesque 56 minutes ago
      Blue bubbles.
  • jgbuddy 56 minutes ago
    Next; IOS will be decompiled and open source
    • xp84 37 minutes 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 2 minutes 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 29 minutes 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.

  • diimdeep 36 minutes 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.
  • westurner 1 hour ago
    Does this make it possible to quality control iOS apps without MacOS runners with xcodebuild in CI like GitHub Actions?
  • jgbuddy 1 hour ago
    amazing, but who is OO SEX GANG
    • freedomben 1 hour ago
      my guess is a lot of Java people who refuse to get on the functional train
  • sheepscreek 1 hour ago
    Madness. I love it.
    • Grombobulous 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 18 minutes ago
          My comment as a whole is not meant to be taken this seriously.
      • anthk 42 minutes 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.