Show HN: Run full iOS 16.5 firmware on Android Devices
75 points by aghuang 2 hours ago | 34 comments

aghuang 47 minutes 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

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semolino 37 minutes ago
Are those tubal ligation scars on the mascot?
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dpacmittal 16 minutes ago
I'm surprised Camera works. Even postmarketOS has difficulty with camera on most devices.
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simlevesque 34 minutes ago
Thank you.
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1f60c 60 seconds ago
There is one, uh, minor drawback:

  > Does not work (yet)
  >
  > Charging under our kernel (the phone only discharges)
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pmkary 36 minutes ago
Someone finally did this, wow! 2026 just keeps getting more crazy.
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sanid 53 minutes 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.
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gruez 50 minutes 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.

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mshish 16 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.
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gruez 13 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. Normally there's supposed to be content (ie. maps). You'd be better off using an android skinned as ios (possibly vibedcoded) than using this mess.

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torben-friis 60 minutes ago
I wonder, why 16.5? (That would be 2023's versión).

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

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MBCook 21 minutes ago
They crank up security every release. Perhaps ones after that were somehow drastically harder?
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dj_io 32 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.
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Velocifyer 11 minutes ago
Can you make a GSI to run on any Android Phone?
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bigwheels 19 minutes ago
Why do these demonstrations all stop at iOS 16? What changed with iOS 17?
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saagarjha 32 minutes ago
Hmm. Maybe small iPhone might be easier to revive than we thought!
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nullpoint420 2 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!

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jgbuddy 34 minutes ago
Next; IOS will be decompiled and open source
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xp84 15 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.
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compiler-guy 6 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.

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hollowonepl 2 hours ago
Wow, do I smell the opportunity to have IOS analogy to Graphene OS built on top of such concept?
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gruez 52 minutes 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.
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diimdeep 13 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.
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embedding-shape 51 minutes 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 :)
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cosmic_cheese 49 seconds 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. Booting up an old Android 9 device a few months back was striking in how much more appeal it held.

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TheSkyHasEyes 40 minutes ago
Not with a locked bootloader, not yet anyway.
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simlevesque 33 minutes ago
Blue bubbles.
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jgbuddy 2 hours ago
amazing, but who is OO SEX GANG
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freedomben 56 minutes ago
my guess is a lot of Java people who refuse to get on the functional train
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westurner 54 minutes ago
Does this make it possible to quality control iOS apps without MacOS runners with xcodebuild in CI like GitHub Actions?
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sheepscreek 2 hours ago
Madness. I love it.
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Grombobulous 59 minutes 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.

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add-sub-mul-div 49 minutes 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?
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anthk 19 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.

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