Android may be entering the “Black Apple” era! This is not a casually made-up joke, but an open-source project that is currently underway. Starting October 15, a development team calling itself “OOSexGang”… Telegram channelThey loudly claim that their Hackios project lets “genuine iOS” run on Android hardware, promising that it will be completely free and open-sourced in the future.
“We might actually be making history”—this is the title of Hackios’s pinned post. The project has involved months of development, debugging, reverse engineering, and component rewrites; it is by no means a casual weekend project. But so far, Hackios’s claims have no third-party verification on real hardware, no public code, and no downloadable firmware—only short videos showing it running and some system screenshots.
Where did the topic come from: a mysterious Telegram channel sparked it.
The only original source of the news is the Telegram channel “oosexgang-developers,” which has about 503 subscribers (now nearly 9,000). Starting in early October, the channel began posting a series of short videos and progress reports, claiming that Hackios uses its own UEFI implementation and large-scale reverse engineering to run the iOS system kernel and services directly on non-Apple hardware—something completely different from launchers, reskinned ROMs, or emulators on the market.
The development timeline as described by the team is roughly as follows, all taken from progress reports published by the channel itself:
- Around October 13: Partially enabled the graphics accelerator, fixed the wallpaper overlay issue, and restored normal widget display.
- In the following daysOn a punch-hole display model, open Safari and demonstrate loading YouTube.
- Around October 16: Audio output, haptics, flashlight, and Wi-Fi are gradually being restored and made usable, and the camera sensor has begun sending images into the system’s built-in Camera app.
- NamingThe project name was decided by a member vote, with Hackios beating the two candidate names XNUDroid and Project Darwinized.
- Goal: Initial support for 5 or more models with Snapdragon processors; source code will be open-sourced after code cleanup and optimization are completed.
Who Is the Developer: The Real Story Behind the Custom ROM Community and the “US$2,000 Claude”
OOSexGang is not an account that appeared out of nowhere; the core members wannqn They have 21 public repositories on GitHub, all of which are hardcore projects in the Android flashing community: the device tree and kernel source code for the Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G (codename renoir), the SM8350 platform kernel, OrangeFox Recovery build tools, a modified version of Play Integrity Fix, and so on. In other words, this developer has spent years writing kernels and custom firmware for Xiaomi phones, which aligns perfectly with the project’s claimed test device, the Mi 11 Lite 5G, and they have a technical background in low-level porting.
Another member, shimoku74, has only three sparse repositories on their GitHub account, with no visible work related to the iOS port. Rumor has it that this code was “hacked together with $2,000 (about NT$65,000) worth of Claude credits”; it currently “has a huge number of bugs,” and the team is in the final sprint. Once completed, it will be completely free and open source, with no paywall and no VIP plan.
Officially demonstrated progress: the iOS 16.5 screen and the identity of the iPhone X.
According to a compilation by Russian media and videos released by the channel, the results currently demonstrated publicly include the following items. The test models are Poco X5 Pro (codename redwood) and Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G (codename renoir):
- System screen: The iOS Home Screen and widgets display correctly, the system information page shows the device as iPhone X running iOS 16.5, and the system keyboard works normally.
- ApplicationThe Safari browser can open and load YouTube.
- Peripheral hardware: Sound effects, haptic vibration, flashlight, and Wi-Fi become available, and the camera sensor begins outputting images.
The system information showing iPhone X technically makes sense: to get iOS to boot, you have to spoof Apple device identification information to fool the system checks, and showing it as an iPhone X fits the logic of this approach. The same team had earlier demonstrated footage of the iOS kernel booting on a 2016 Samsung Galaxy J1, when the level of completion was even lower.
Technically speaking, how should this be viewed: the route has precedents, but the difficulty is hell-level.
Let’s first clarify the part that is supported by evidence. There are already precedents in the community for Android phones using UEFI firmware to boot other systems; for example, EDK2-based projects like Renegade Project have gotten some Snapdragon phones to run Windows. Hackios claims to have built its own UEFI implementation, and team members have also stated on their channel that anyone can adapt their own device to their UEFI implementation, and that the project is 100% free.
The biggest hurdle is drivers. The XNU kernel is open source, but iOS’s user space and all hardware drivers are Apple’s closed-source assets. To get iOS running smoothly on a Snapdragon phone, drivers for the GPU, baseband, camera, touch, and so on all have to be written from scratch, and writing an XNU version of the Adreno GPU driver is notoriously tough. In past cases, Corellium’s Project Sandcastle got Android running on an iPhone—the opposite direction; before Hackios, there had been no publicly known successful case of “iOS running on Android hardware,” and if true, this would indeed be the first.
Doubts: reasons we can’t fully believe it yet
- Single-source circular reportingAt present, all media content points to the same Telegram channel; there is no second independent source, and even the “member confirmation” cited by Russian media is just the channel’s own self-referential claim.
- There is no code and no build.On the public GitHub page, no XNU, iOS driver, or UEFI-related code can be found. Russian media claimed that the author’s repository contains driver commits for Qualcomm chips; after actual verification, the public repositories are all projects such as Android kernels, device trees, and Play Integrity Fix, which does not match this claim.
- All the evidence consists of their own short videos.No one has independently verified the actual device’s operation, and the appearance of the device in the video cannot prove that it is not equipped with an iPhone motherboard.
- The progress is unreasonably fast.It was only on October 13 that the graphics accelerator was “partially enabled,” and three days later audio, Wi-Fi, vibration, and camera sensors were all in place. Completing driver engineering at this level with what the author describes as “code generated by $2,000 in AI credits” contradicts the same author’s acknowledgment that there were “a huge number of bugs.”
- The community itself is also bracing itself in advance.On X, someone half-jokingly pointed out that if this is real, you could buy an $80 (about NT$2,600) China-made Android phone designed to look like an iPhone, flash Hackios onto it, and resell it as an iPhone for $700 (about NT$22,000). At the same time, tech folks in English-language circles are also urging people to “stay skeptical and wait until it holds up.”
Outlook: Keep an eye on these three things next.
- When will the open-source promise be fulfilled?The team says that once completed, it will be 100% free and open source, and anyone can adapt their own devices to this UEFI implementation.[4] The day the code is actually pushed to GitHub is the starting point for outsiders to verify it for themselves.
- Third-party real-device verificationIndependent developers need to obtain the installable build, actually flash it on a Poco X5 Pro or Mi 11 Lite 5G, and record the entire process as evidence, preferably reproducing key features such as Safari and the camera.
- Apple’s reactionThe iOS userland is Apple’s copyrighted asset, and large-scale reverse engineering combined with redistribution could cross legal red lines at any time. It is worth continuing to watch at what stage the project will prompt Apple to take action.
If these three things happen in sequence, Hackios will go from a community legend to a project worth following seriously—and could even reshape the mobile OS landscape. If a month from now all that remains is a few short videos and a quiet channel, this wave of hype will end there. Until then, the current status of “running real iOS on Android” is this: someone is trying, and has produced footage that looks quite convincing, but no one has yet completed the verification for readers.
Source:playground.ru
Source: KOCPC Chinese