For sixteen years, the trick only worked one way. Android ran on iPhones as far back as 2010, when the iDroid project booted it on early hardware, and Corellium's Project Sandcastle repeated the feat a decade later. Nobody had publicly done the reverse — until this week, when videos of genuine iOS 16 booting on Android phones started racking up millions of views on X.
The clip that went widest, shared by @techdroider, shows a Redmi Note 12 4G scrolling kernel text, flashing the Apple logo, and landing on the iOS lock screen. It has passed two million views. Decrypt reports another developer has since posted a build running on a Nothing 3a.
The recipe is less exotic than it sounds. Apple publishes the XNU kernel — the core of iOS — as open source. A GitHub project called ios-sweet patches that kernel to run on a Redmi Note 10 Pro's Snapdragon 732G, then layers unmodified iOS 16.7.16 system files from an iPhone X on top. Developer Makr's follow-up project, ios-topaz, does the same for the Note 12's Snapdragon 685. Open the About page, tech-ish notes, and the Redmi identifies itself as an iPhone X.
Now the honest part. The phone takes roughly three minutes to boot. There is no graphics driver, so the CPU draws every pixel itself at 20 to 30 frames per second. Only four of the chip's eight cores can be used. Wi-Fi, mobile data, Bluetooth, audio, the camera, and GPS are all dead — which means no calls, no iMessage, no FaceTime. Touch and the buttons reportedly work, per Makr's later posts. Installing it erases the phone and switches off most of its security protections, and the ios-sweet developers describe their own work as an "experimental bring-up, not a usable phone OS."
None of that makes it a daily driver, or even a phone. What it is, is a proof: Apple's software is not welded to Apple's silicon as completely as sixteen years of failed attempts suggested, and the lever that pried it loose is code Apple itself gives away. The crack is tiny. It's also the first one.
— via Decrypt