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.
So all the experienced people already in the software field can’t use these models to go even further in their designs? I find that hard to believe in short, i think the bar to entry is just gonna go to a higher level.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
Many of them are not doing anything complicated, it's just a walled garden. Animoog is from 2011 and Moog Model D is from 2018 for example - iOS-exclusive but any modern Android tablet is going to smoke an iPad from that era.
Fair point iPads have decent specs for the price, but if you already have an Android tablet, it would be nice to not have to buy an extra device.
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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.
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.
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.
I have my reservations. The cats can also use AI to make their software less buggy or even formally verified.
If I had to venture a guess it would be that this is the last stand for hackers that are able to root all kinds of older devices, but companies like Apple will shell out the money to prevent this for their next-gen devices.
It's likely that low-cost device makers will not do that, so maybe rooting will still persist for cheap stuff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
In comparison to who?, because the competition is lagging see the new Surface laptop by Microsoft/Nvidia which is the second or third effort by Microsoft? the previous version with Qualcomm has been a failure, Apple currently has five ecosystems to go with Apple Silicon who is this other company out there that can say the same, is the operating system perfect no is anything in the tech world? It’s iteration over time and never stopping or else you get to join Motorola of Schaumburg, Illinois, or take a backseat like IBM, or Intel.
I wish someone would take out a license with Arm and build a computer using Linux creating a user-friendly computer. After all, it’s been 35 years.
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.
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.
And many would say Microsoft Windows, Android and Linux are well, not that good, someone who remembers all those other vertical computer companies from the 1980s to early 1990s who had a OS to go with in-house hardware and I’m afraid that’s where Apple has the others beat the integration of the two is where it’s at, parasitically hanging off someone else’s hardware, is not going get the job done not against Apple. or anyone else that chooses to go down the same path, and I don’t mean parasitically hanging off someone else’s hardware.
> iOS is the best part of an iPhone, just like MacOS is the best part of a Mac.
This is a very hot take. I think you'll find quite a lot of people are unhappy with the state of the two OSes, while still regarding the hardware as best-in-class
Some of the people in the tech crowd may feel that way. In regular person land it’s very hard to beat Apple. A company that designs the OS and the hardware together as one wins out and if it was easy, more companies would have done it over the years.
It certainly is taking a whole bunch of people a lot of time to produce something better and I’m sorry, Windows and Microsoft aren’t it in the mid 80s in the early 90s there were many in some cases, better solutions by several vertical computer companies not saying all of them were better, but you can’t beat designing the operating system and the hardware under one roof again parasitically hanging off someone else’s hardware equals a bad, poorly performing solution.
That's not been the case for quite a while. Every MacOS release for the last few years results in a choir of "just take a break to fix the bugs". Every new release breaks something about the UX, system crashing bugs are not fixed, old features are restricted and deprecated without replacements (sandbox?), the open sources are published incomplete and impossible to compile, silly user restrictions are in place (want to add a codec or fix the BT stack? lol, not allowed), etc. etc.
MacOS is a practically enforced part of Mac. I'd love to get rid of it because it's not even good.
It's easy for you to get rid off MacOS: Buy a different computer.
In relation to the rest of your comment: Yes, MacOS and iOS sucks. All the alternatives suck twice as bad. Which is why somebody might want to upgrade their phone to iOS.
If you're making decisions, it's easy. If the whole company is standardised in their dev environment, you get a MacBook and that's it. Which, to be clear, makes sense in terms of proper fleet management. But I'd love to have a Linux laptop at work instead. (No, Asahi is not an option for managed devices. VMs are also not good enough to use as the main desktop)
I would say it’s the combination of iOS, MacOS, and the other three Apple OSs (ecosystems) and Apple Silicon is what puts Apple ahead of Microsoft, AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Google.
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”
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.
It's what you get used to or what you prefer. I have some issues with how iPhones work and prefer an Android system. But having an Android on a second hand iPhone hardware could be tempting.
They are just wasting time, a better use of their time. Would be taking a license out from Arm for designing processors and building something from the ground up like those three former engineers who worked at Apple who later got paid $1.2 billion for their work by Qualcomm when their company Nuvia was bought out.
It has an, uh, interesting funding model: “$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.”
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.
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.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 29.9 ms ] threadMicrosoft, 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.
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.
What a time to be alive!
Not to detract from how awesome this is, just curious.
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.
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 :)
Fair point iPads have decent specs for the price, but if you already have an Android tablet, it would be nice to not have to buy an extra device.
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
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
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.
If I had to venture a guess it would be that this is the last stand for hackers that are able to root all kinds of older devices, but companies like Apple will shell out the money to prevent this for their next-gen devices.
It's likely that low-cost device makers will not do that, so maybe rooting will still persist for cheap stuff.
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.
We already have nearly a dozen of Adobe and Autodesk knock off apps.
It's going to be hilarious.
Have you checked out the hackintosh community lately? They have a near fully functional port to Snapdragon now.
https://github.com/Snapintosh/Snapintosh
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.
And before that, PowerMacs and PowerBooks.
Then Nvidia got into a feud over Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm making their own GPUs so Apple ragequit and gave them the finger.
I wish someone would take out a license with Arm and build a computer using Linux creating a user-friendly computer. After all, it’s been 35 years.
This is a very hot take. I think you'll find quite a lot of people are unhappy with the state of the two OSes, while still regarding the hardware as best-in-class
It certainly is taking a whole bunch of people a lot of time to produce something better and I’m sorry, Windows and Microsoft aren’t it in the mid 80s in the early 90s there were many in some cases, better solutions by several vertical computer companies not saying all of them were better, but you can’t beat designing the operating system and the hardware under one roof again parasitically hanging off someone else’s hardware equals a bad, poorly performing solution.
MacOS is a practically enforced part of Mac. I'd love to get rid of it because it's not even good.
In relation to the rest of your comment: Yes, MacOS and iOS sucks. All the alternatives suck twice as bad. Which is why somebody might want to upgrade their phone to iOS.
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.
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.
I don't think there is a lot of people who actually clone the repos and try the stuff.
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.