Run iOS 16.5 firmware on Android devices
Archived — this story has rotated out of today’s deck. It is kept here in full.
The gist
The OOSexGang group showed iOS 16.5 booting on a Poco X5 Pro and Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G.
No code or independent check exists, so it is only a demo.
Background
OOSexGang is the group behind HackiOS, an experimental project that boots Apple's open-source XNU kernel (the core of iOS 16.5) and the unmodified iOS 16.5 user space on Android hardware. It is hard because iOS is built for Apple's chips and components, while a Snapdragon phone has a different GPU, modem and sensors with mostly proprietary drivers; getting iOS onto Qualcomm's Adreno GPU remains a major hurdle. The demos drew attention after clips of iOS running on a Redmi Note 12 passed 2 million views on X.
How it unfolded
- Oct 16, 2026A clip of iOS 16 running on a Redmi Note 12 passes 2 million views on X, and another developer posts a build running on a Nothing 3a. Researcher Md Ismail Šojal posts that HackiOS is attempting a full code rewrite and is in the final polishing stage.
- Oct 18, 2026HackiOS shows iOS 16.5 booting on the Poco X5 Pro and Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G; researchers note only demos exist, with no public code, no installable build and no independent verification.
- Oct 19, 2026Šojal posts that iOS 16.5 is running on Android hardware and that Safari pulls an APK from APKMirror but fails to run it, and says a new demo could be a public release soon. Reports describe the project using a custom UEFI boot firmware and the XNU kernel.
Who’s saying what
- Researcher
- Šojal says iOS 16.5 is running on Android hardware, that a new demo could become a public release soon, and that if the rewrite works it will be completely free and open with no paywalls.
- Caution
- Researchers who shared the demonstration say no source code is publicly available and there has been no independent verification.
- Project
- HackiOS/OOSexGang claims to boot real iOS using UEFI boot firmware and a port of XNU, while admitting there are many bugs.
Still unverified
The HackiOS iOS 16.5 demo has no public source code and no independent verification; one article calls the reported progress too fast, noting the group admits many bugs.