yesterday at 4:28 PM
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
yesterday at 7:18 PM
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.
yesterday at 10:54 PM
Ok, we've un-show-hn'd it and will leave the submission otherwise intact.
today at 1:08 AM
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
yesterday at 4:38 PM
Are those tubal ligation scars on the mascot?
yesterday at 4:59 PM
I'm surprised Camera works. Even postmarketOS has difficulty with camera on most devices.
yesterday at 4:41 PM
Thank you.
yesterday at 4:22 PM
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.
yesterday at 4:25 PM
>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.
yesterday at 11:33 PM
Sounds like a huge win to me. Neither of those should be required. Replace Apple's walled garden with open login and open stores.
yesterday at 4:59 PM
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.
yesterday at 5:02 PM
>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.
yesterday at 9:25 PM
Someone is going to set up an unofficial app store for this and fill it with pirated and malware-ridden apps. Then some companies will be convinced into releasing .ipsw files for "debug and research" purposes and starts taking subscription through those installs. Then Apple will lose choices but to support randomly downloaded .ipsw files on regular iOS devices to avoid becoming the lesser option against those, and we could slowly crawl back to the code freedom we had in 2006. Or this gets DMCA'd in 3 hours and nothing will come of it.
yesterday at 5:46 PM
also,
>Does not work (yet)
>- Cellular, Bluetooth
>- Charging under our kernel (the phone only discharges)
yesterday at 9:52 PM
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?
yesterday at 10:01 PM
Didn't the legal battle between Apple and Samsung show that Apple would not be very open to a iPhone clone?
yesterday at 10:09 PM
Are you trying to say that phone clone companies are beholden to laws? Because I can assure you that they are not.
Just like you can still buy fakes rolexes etc lmao.
today at 5:12 AM
It is definitely not legal to sell counterfeit goods, including imitation Rolex watches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_Counterfeiting_Act_o...
Even if you disclose to the buyer that it's counterfeit, it's _still_ illegal. You can't just use someone else's name, logo, or protected designs without authorization.
In fact, it's so severe, you can face >= 10 yrs in Federal PMIA prison and owe fines up to $2M — just for the first offense.
yesterday at 10:16 PM
I'd venture the legal forces that Apple can bring to bear are not in the same ballpark as Rolex. I'd expect Apple to use their influence with US govt to get Customs to stop shipments from coming in. It's not like these devices would be made in the US.
yesterday at 10:35 PM
But they also don't have to be bought exclusively in the US.
yesterday at 10:40 PM
Clones/knock offs are already illegal. Doesn't really stop em. Only technology solutions can, until they're broken as well.
yesterday at 10:37 PM
They could implement Grapple Store and then clone most popular apps.
yesterday at 11:22 PM
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).
yesterday at 9:00 PM
> 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.
yesterday at 9:14 PM
> 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?
today at 2:17 AM
Sometimes a watch dog, if you don't poke the correct thing regularly the system can think there's been a crash.
yesterday at 5:44 PM
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.
yesterday at 7:13 PM
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.
yesterday at 8:25 PM
You know damn well that different people like different things. Very Brian Griffin comment.
yesterday at 9:05 PM
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”
yesterday at 9:58 PM
Having been given an android work phone, I can’t understand why anyone would use this willingly.
The desirable outcome for most people doesn’t seem to be the ability to run android on an iPhone, let’s put it that way.
yesterday at 10:10 PM
> Having been given an android work phone, I can’t understand why anyone would use this willingly.
This is probably a commercial Android distro like Samsung's or Google's, filled with OEM crapware. Pure Android is far better than that and is free (freedom to install apps, inspect the source code, etc.) It's basically a Linux distro for smart phones.
today at 3:23 AM
yesterday at 10:31 PM
It’s crap, sorry. It’s an inconsistent mess. Having come from iOS it’s as clear as night and day.
It doesn’t really matter to me if there’s some other specific version of Android that fixes some issues if I install it. As a user that’s not something I care about.
yesterday at 10:42 PM
> Having come from iOS it’s as clear as night and day.
It's odd because, as someone who daily drives a Pixel with GrapheneOS and also owns an iPhone, my experience is the opposite. You could not pay be to go back to a device controlled by a corporation, and on which I am not allowed to run programs without Apple's blessing. The UI is largely a matter of taste, by now all mobile operating systems have converged to a broadly identical design and similar gestures etc.
yesterday at 10:55 PM
You guys are talking about different things.
today at 7:32 AM
As a user too, android works far better for me and I was an Apple user for a few years.
Not having the ugly frosted glass thing is a very big plus.
yesterday at 10:56 PM
I use both, iOS for past 10 years and now Android again.
Both are inconsistent mess.
today at 12:27 AM
The most desirable outcome with iPhones is to be able to run an up to date fully-patched iOS on them with up to date apps for as long as the device will function.
The next most desirable outcome is to be able to run another solid/secure/up-to-date mobile OS on them, and it gets more relatively desirable once iOS stops supporting the device.
today at 1:07 AM
They don’t come across as an Apple fanboy; they’re just stating they’d rather have the more private OS on the better hardware.
yesterday at 6:20 PM
For that warm feeling you get, when Apple turns their legal lasers on you.
today at 7:20 AM
The cheapest way to heat your home this winter is to accrue so many cease and desist letters you can use them as fuel!
yesterday at 5:47 PM
to finally have a Blue iMessage bubble in your group texts
yesterday at 5:53 PM
That likely doesn't work because they require device attestation to access imessage. It's what killed beeper mini too.
yesterday at 8:47 PM
Stolen valor!
today at 12:57 AM
You're on a website called "hacker" news. Inclined to downvote so that this doesn't take up conversation space.
today at 3:03 AM
It's not about we should or not, it's about we could or not
yesterday at 8:20 PM
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.
yesterday at 9:59 PM
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.
yesterday at 11:58 PM
The Mac Pro 2013 carried an AMD D300/500/700 GPU, not Nvidia.
today at 2:08 AM
doh! I so don't think about AMD that I even forget when they are actually used and forget they even exist. But of course it should have felt weird using Apple/Nvidea in the same breath
yesterday at 10:01 PM
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.
yesterday at 10:57 PM
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.
yesterday at 7:29 PM
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.
yesterday at 4:14 PM
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!
yesterday at 6:45 PM
It seems a bit crazy to me, plus now it opens the door to many iPhone copies... we'll have to be very careful
yesterday at 8:25 PM
No. We should be very bold.
yesterday at 9:08 PM
But I wanted to be italic.
yesterday at 10:03 PM
Heavy is the head.
today at 5:14 AM
Wrong thread, Rolexes are discussed above.
yesterday at 9:14 PM
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.
yesterday at 9:31 PM
> 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.
today at 7:17 AM
They qouldnt convincethe average HN user, bur your saying they wouldn't convince my grandma?
today at 5:40 AM
They absolutely aren't "fancier launchers", they changed absolutely everything, they have the iOS settings, a fake appstore.. have a look on youtube on fake iphones.
yesterday at 4:15 PM
I wonder, why 16.5? (That would be 2023's versiĂłn).
Not to detract from how awesome this is, just curious.
yesterday at 4:54 PM
They crank up security every release. Perhaps ones after that were somehow drastically harder?
yesterday at 4:39 PM
Someone finally did this, wow! 2026 just keeps getting more crazy.
yesterday at 9:54 PM
Maybe tomorrow we get Android running on the iPhone (and Linux on the iPad please).
yesterday at 9:59 PM
> and Linux on the iPad please
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172883
yesterday at 11:32 PM
UTM was almost good enough but the procedure to enable JIT every time you run it was extremely clunky.
today at 2:35 AM
If you can get iOS 16.5 to run on Android, how much more is a stretch to move it to Linux?
yesterday at 5:13 PM
There is one, uh, minor drawback:
> Does not work (yet)
>
> Charging under our kernel (the phone only discharges)yesterday at 5:35 PM
Single use OS
yesterday at 5:45 PM
The burningest of burners
yesterday at 8:39 PM
That would be if "the phone only discharges, all at once"
yesterday at 5:37 PM
Pack it up and go home, everyone. The alpha-release doesn't chart. Time to throw in the towel. /s
yesterday at 9:32 PM
Not even /s can save this one, mate. Poor form.
yesterday at 4:41 PM
Next; IOS will be decompiled and open source
yesterday at 5:00 PM
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.
yesterday at 5:36 PM
> 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.
yesterday at 11:00 PM
It's only a matter of finding exploitative bugs, this already happened before in Apple devices precisely.
today at 7:54 AM
Bugs yes, sure, there will always be bugs. But it already is really, really difficult to get non-privileged code execution access, even harder to achieve tethered root access (i.e. root access that holds until a reboot), and all but impossible to get untethered root access that survives reboots.
today at 2:24 AM
one click exploit is fun when you trying to jailbreak your phone; it is a nightmare when a random website do that
yesterday at 5:09 PM
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.
today at 3:22 AM
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.
yesterday at 11:07 PM
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.
yesterday at 11:40 PM
Yes. Those are clones or clonish. Not originals. So saying "Autodesk is opensource" isn't correct.
A clone of autodesk may be open source however.
yesterday at 7:00 PM
I suppose Anthropic has relaxed its safety checks to such an extent that Claude now agrees to port iOS to Android phones?
yesterday at 7:12 PM
ISA - iOS subsystem for Android
yesterday at 7:16 PM
You mean the Android subsystem for iOS?
yesterday at 6:17 PM
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.”
today at 4:02 AM
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
yesterday at 4:13 PM
Wow, do I smell the opportunity to have IOS analogy to Graphene OS built on top of such concept?
yesterday at 4:23 PM
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.
yesterday at 9:41 PM
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.
today at 1:47 AM
Counting down the days until someone gets full linux on old ipads!
yesterday at 4:43 PM
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.
yesterday at 4:56 PM
Why do these demonstrations all stop at iOS 16? What changed with iOS 17?
yesterday at 6:20 PM
Secure Page Table Monitor and Trusted Execution Monitor
yesterday at 7:07 PM
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.
yesterday at 7:17 PM
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!
yesterday at 7:09 PM
I wonder how they landed on 16.5
today at 4:17 AM
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.
yesterday at 6:49 PM
Should be called phockintosh! I don’t see a use case for it but cool concept
today at 12:06 AM
Maybe iPhake or iPhack?
yesterday at 6:51 PM
The guy who did it is a genius
yesterday at 4:11 PM
amazing, but who is OO SEX GANG
yesterday at 4:19 PM
my guess is a lot of Java people who refuse to get on the functional train
yesterday at 8:58 PM
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.
yesterday at 9:31 PM
That’s… not what’s happening here.
today at 1:18 AM
ah fair enough. Didn't look close enough. Oh well.
yesterday at 4:21 PM
Does this make it possible to quality control iOS apps without MacOS runners with xcodebuild in CI like GitHub Actions?
yesterday at 5:28 PM
https://chefkiss.dev/applehax/inferno/
yesterday at 5:38 PM
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.
yesterday at 11:32 PM
Is there something like MicroG for Android for iOS?
yesterday at 4:43 PM
Hmm. Maybe small iPhone might be easier to revive than we thought!
yesterday at 5:04 PM
Can you make a GSI to run on any Android Phone?
today at 5:17 AM
Now do NixOS on an old iPhone or Android device.
yesterday at 4:24 PM
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 :)
today at 7:23 AM
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.
yesterday at 5:14 PM
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.
yesterday at 4:42 PM
Blue bubbles.
yesterday at 4:35 PM
Not with a locked bootloader, not yet anyway.
yesterday at 7:25 PM
> 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 :)
yesterday at 4:10 PM
Madness. I love it.
yesterday at 4:16 PM
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.
yesterday at 4:56 PM
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.
yesterday at 6:38 PM
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?
yesterday at 8:19 PM
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.
yesterday at 4:26 PM
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?
yesterday at 5:19 PM
My comment as a whole is not meant to be taken this seriously.
yesterday at 10:44 PM
> 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!
yesterday at 6:18 PM
I wonder how many if these AI projects have malware?
yesterday at 6:47 PM
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.
yesterday at 9:32 PM
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.
yesterday at 6:03 PM
yesterday at 5:02 PM
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.
yesterday at 6:26 PM
Wow
yesterday at 5:49 PM
Amazing. On par with cutting off my leg before playing soccer.
yesterday at 7:24 PM
[flagged]
yesterday at 6:21 PM
[dead]
yesterday at 8:59 PM
cool, but probably better to place your time and energy into a more applicable use.
yesterday at 7:10 PM
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.
yesterday at 7:30 PM
You are free to become "more cool" yourself
yesterday at 7:28 PM
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.
yesterday at 7:24 PM
> 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.
yesterday at 7:26 PM
[dead]