Developers use AI reverse engineering to run iOS 16 on Android phones such as Redmi

[[**When a 999-yuan Redmi lights up with the Apple logo, the thing Cook fears most has happened—developers, using AI reverse engineering, have successfully booted and run iOS 16 on Android phones such as Xiaomi's Redmi. But the functionality is incomplete, it is limited to geek demos, and Apple's ecosystem moat has not truly been breached.**

**Key Points**

**1. Running iOS on Android phones has become a reality**

Developer dipa-studio successfully booted iOS 16.7.16 on a Redmi Note 10 Pro, able to reach the home screen, operate settings, and provide touch feedback; subsequently, similar demos appeared on devices such as the Redmi Note 12, Nothing Phone, and OnePlus 12, and iOS porting projects exploded in growth on GitHub.

**2. AI greatly lowers the barrier to reverse engineering**

Developers used AI tools such as Claude and Codex to assist in writing driver adaptation code, and a dedicated tool even emerged, REA (Reverse Engineer Anything), which can automatically analyze hardware interfaces and generate adapter code, leaving humans reduced to little more than "a robotic arm pressing the power button."

**3. The current version is far from practical**

Cellular network, Bluetooth, camera, and speaker are all unusable; GPU hardware acceleration has not been made to work, causing lag; booting takes 4 minutes; security mechanisms have been weakened (code signing relaxed, key services simplified); it is only suitable for try-it-out demos.

**4. The project is evolving faster, but its prospects are uncertain**

Thanks to an AI-assisted "relay race" model (the AGENTS.md handoff manual in the project repository), the project is progressing extremely fast: gesture navigation, Wi-Fi connectivity, and more have already been conquered in some branches, but whether the ideal of Android hardware + iOS system can truly be realized remains in doubt. 2026-10-21 17:22 When a 999-yuan Redmi lights up with the Apple logo, the thing Cook fears most has happened Blue Letter Plan Quick Overview

This article comes from the WeChat public account: Blue Letter Plan, author: Hayward

So many people hype the iPhone—do you really think it's because the hardware has something exceptional?

When it comes to fast charging, battery capacity, periscope telephoto, and cooling hardware, domestic Android flagships long ago left the toothpaste factory far behind. Everyone grits their teeth and puts up with poor signal and slow charging; frankly, it's all because iOS is clean, smooth, secure, and easy to use.

But what if I told you that there is now a chance to use the real iOS on an Android phone?

Not the kind of "imitation desktop theme" from app stores in the past that just changes icons, and not a shell emulator either. Just these past few days, the geek circles overseas have gone completely crazy. A developer posted an extremely outrageous real-device demo on X: an old Redmi phone was actually running the iOS system.

On this old Redmi phone, not only does the familiar Apple logo appear at boot, but it can also enter the iOS lock screen and home screen, respond to touch operations, and open Control Center and system settings.

|Real-device footage of a Redmi device running iOS|Image source: Habr report

You should know that the closed software and hardware ecosystem has always been Apple's proudest and most sacred untouchable moat. In the more than ten years since iOS was born, there have been countless projects attempting to port or replicate it, but in the end all that has been left are various system skins that retain the outer appearance of iOS.

Could it be that Apple's impregnable moat has really been brute-forced by folk masters this time?

iOS is really on Android now

In this frenzy, the loudest open-source project comes from the GitHub account dipa-studio, called ios-sweet.

In Reddit's Hackintosh community, the poster showed off his masterpiece: a Redmi Note 10 Pro phone he had on hand, equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 732G processor, already a five-year-old antique, yet it successfully booted and ran iOS 16.7.16 system components from an iPhone X.

Note that what runs on this Redmi phone is not some screenshot or skin. Besides being able to normally enter the desktop, operate the settings menu, and open Control Center, according to the project's subsequent development records, it already supports swiping up from the bottom to return to the desktop, multitasking app switching, and even all 8 CPU cores of the Snapdragon chip in the device have been successfully awakened.

Even more exciting, after dipa directly published the source code and tutorial on GitHub, people soon made new ports based on it. At the same time, similar demos also began to appear on more devices:

For example, developer Makr ported this solution to the Redmi Note 12 4G equipped with Snapdragon 685 (project name ios-topaz), posted a real-device demo running iOS 16 on X, and the side buttons and touch functions can all work.

Another developer, Saalim Quadri, showed footage of iOS running on a Nothing Phone (3a), and on the OnePlus 12, which has very deep ties to this phone, an iOS system capable of implementing certain functions is also running.

Even beyond phones, Android tablets have not been spared either; someone is tinkering with iPadOS.

An independent project called UniXNU has set its sights directly on the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro equipped with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, not only releasing detailed device driver documentation but also specifying adaptation for iPadOS 17.7.11.

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So this iOS port became a developer frenzy. From old Redmi phones to flagship Xiaomi tablets, this group of developers, like opening blind boxes, went crazy trying to see what other machines they could stuff Apple's system into.

But here's the problem: the reason Apple's iOS is so hard to port is that its software was designed from the ground up around Apple's own chips and custom hardware. To get the low-level driver adaptation for a different set of hardware working, you have to figure out how to deal with a large number of interfaces that lack complete documentation and device differences that are simply from two different worlds.

Why is it that in this October of 2026, this ragtag bunch suddenly seems to have cheats enabled, successively posting progress on new devices?

Flip open the development logs in the ios-sweet repository and you'll see a major variable: the one helping the developers pull off miracles through sheer force is none other than you, AI.

To stuff iOS into a Xiaomi phone requires a massive amount of low-level adaptation, and it also can't do without extremely tedious and hardcore "reverse engineering."

Although Apple has open-sourced the lowest-level XNU kernel, and Qualcomm and Xiaomi have also published the Android kernel code, the two simply don't speak the same language.

For example, the touchscreen chip in a Xiaomi phone reports "a finger pressed at coordinates (X,Y)," but the iOS system can't understand the Qualcomm chip's language, so the result is that the screen doesn't respond at all; or when iOS boots it can't find the Apple original screen it expects, and in the end the entire interface process simply crashes to a black screen.

In the past, encountering this kind of problem often required experienced developers to dig through assembly code line by line, studying interfaces and hardware behavior. But look at how dipa did it?

In his development log (NOTES.md), he recorded an absurd yet cyberpunk workflow: "The human is responsible for pressing the phone's power button, Claude is responsible for typing commands."

Throughout the entire porting process, the developer himself was reduced almost to the AI's "flesh-and-blood robotic arm." When the screen wouldn't light up or touch failed, the AI itself read Apple's error logs, compared Qualcomm's Android driver source code, analyzed memory addresses, and then wrote a piece of adapter code that "translates" Xiaomi touch signals into Apple touch events.

Funniest of all is one entry in the log: while writing, OpenAI's Codex usage quota suddenly maxed out and hit bottom. What to do? The developer simply handed the mess over to Anthropic's Claude, letting Claude continue modifying code, compiling, and testing boot following the logs left by its predecessor, seamlessly taking over.

This "AI does reverse engineering" approach has even hatched a dedicated weapon of mass destruction: the recently viral open-source project REA (Reverse Engineer Anything).

This tool, built by developer morluto, simply packages professional decompilation and analysis tools like Hopper, Ghidra, and IDA into an AI assistant.

You don't need software source code, and you don't need development documentation; just throw an existing black-box program at REA, and the AI can call professional tools on its own to follow the clues, inspect memory, find evidence, understand how the program runs, and then do its best to help you rewrite an identical set of functionality.

| REA and Hopper's analysis interface | Image source: REA official repository

Netizen Hunter thought his family's Samsung TV Tizen system was slow to respond and kept automatically playing annoying free channels every day, so he used REA to study Tizen himself and made a clean launcher and home interface.

Meanwhile, another developer, Gathin T., also used Claude Code to clean up his parents' Xiaomi TV, making a clean homepage similar to Apple TV, and open-sourced CleanYourTV.

But the craziest one has to be developer Brandon Thomas (@echelon); ArtCraft, which he participated in developing, has already listed 13 creative and office applications, basically a replica of the Adobe office suite.

| PhotoCraft interface demo | Image source: PhotoCraft official repository

Unfortunately, iOS on Android phones is still a toy

Seeing this, are you already getting ready to go on Xianyu to hunt for a second-hand Redmi Note 10 Pro and try out "young people's first Xiaomi iPhone"?

Don't rush to pull out your wallet. Unfortunately, a stark reality is that this "iOS system installed in an Android phone" is still a hundred thousand miles away from truly being usable as a daily driver.

In the video it looks like it can scroll and enter settings, but that's because the developer only showed you the parts that "work." If you actually flash it onto your phone right now, what greets you will be a disaster-level experience:

First of all, it simply can't be used as a "phone." On the machines in the debut project, cellular mobile network and Bluetooth are all paralyzed, the camera won't open, and the speaker is mute. In other words, you can neither use it to make calls or send WeChat messages, nor take photos or listen to music.

In addition, because Apple's Metal graphics interface has not yet been fully bridged with Qualcomm's Adreno GPU, the current visuals rely entirely on the CPU doing brute-force computation. But when the CPU is doing the GPU's job, how good a performance can you expect?

In the end, a perfectly good high-refresh-rate phone feels very noticeably laggy in daily use. The project author also said that after booting, he waited 4 minutes for the Apple logo to disappear.

Not to mention the other minor issues. The battery service is currently hardcoded, with a fixed 100% full charge displayed in the top-right corner; although the project's supplementary page mentions that the App Store can be opened, there is a high probability that new software cannot be installed, and even the developers themselves are not sure about this outcome.

And the most critical issue lies in security. Although many people choose iOS precisely for security, in order to get the system to boot on non-Apple hardware, this port has relaxed code signing verification and sandbox restrictions, and the underlying services related to key storage have also been replaced with simplified substitutes, making it simply impossible to provide security services of the same standard as the original iOS.

In other words, what it is now is actually a "streaking" version of iOS.

| Early feature limitations listed in the project README | Image source: ios-sweet

The reason for this outcome is that low-level porting of an operating system is not something that can run just by changing a couple of lines of code. Boot loading, screen display, touch interaction, wireless network card, baseband communication, camera ISP, GPU hardware acceleration... every module that looks simple is in fact an independent mountain.

But even so, this project is still unprecedentedly interesting.

In the past, this kind of geek project with no commercial return would often quietly stall and stop updating after the developer's novelty wore off, or after being stuck for months on some low-level bug.

But if you go look at this group's GitHub repository now, you will find an astonishing pace of evolution: a few days ago gesture navigation still did not work, and then it was fixed just like that; over here ios-sweet is still struggling with networking issues, while the branched-off ios-topaz, in its October 20 update, has already been the first to get Wi-Fi connectivity working, and can even remember passwords and automatically reconnect after a restart.

There is even a file called AGENTS.md that dipa specifically created in the repository, a "handover manual" written specifically for AI to read.

| Development and handover conventions in AGENTS.md | Image source: ios-sweet

All of this is aimed at turning this porting project into a relay race through AI. Even if something cannot be solved now, there will always be someone, always some AI, always some way to solve it. Even if developer A's tokens run out, there are still B, C, D... whose AI can carry on.

And their goals are also highly unified. After all, who wouldn't want to use Android phones' top-tier hardware specifications, hundred-watt fast charging and large batteries, while running a smooth and clean Apple iOS system inside?

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