Many people are interested in Apple’s first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, but the price is really more than ordinary people can accept. Recently, a developer overseas came up with another way to make it happen: booting iOS 26 on Microsoft’s long-unsupported dual-screen Android phone, the Surface Duo 2. Both screens can display and respond to touch, and this isn’t just applying an iPhone theme to make it look the part—it’s actually porting Apple’s iOS system over.
Image source: Windows Latest
Microsoft Surface Duo 2 Transforms into “iPhone Duo”! Developer Successfully Ports iOS 26, With Both Dual Screens and Touch Working
According to foreign media Windows Latest Reportedly, developer SmuOS provided exclusive photos showing that he successfully natively booted iOS 26.5.2 on a Surface Duo 2 equipped with a Snapdragon 888 processor, rather than through an emulator.
Hello from Surface DuiOS 26 lol https://t.co/lGqqltdIB7
— SmuOS (@none24smu) October 26, 2026
Open the Settings app’s “About” screen, and the model name says “iPhone 17 Pro Max,” the capacity shows 5GB, and the serial number, Wi-Fi address, and Bluetooth fields are N/A. It is recognized as an iPhone 17 Pro Max because this port uses the official iOS 26.5.2 restore image for the iPhone 17 Pro Max:
However, iOS treats the two screens of Surface Duo 2 as one large screen, so it cannot yet become a true left-right display:
Image source: Windows Latest
Even the Liquid Glass effect from iOS 26 is there, and it operates much like an iPad:
Image source: Windows Latest
The Phone app fares worse: because the dial pad is aligned to the exact center of the entire canvas, 1, 4, 7, and * are on the left screen, while 3, 6, 9, and # are on the right; the middle numbers, along with half of the green call button, are blocked by the hinge and completely unpressable:
Image source: Windows Latest
Although there still seems to be plenty of room for improvement at the moment, SmuOS is making rapid progress.
On October 24, iOS 26 booted successfully for the first time. At that point, only one screen was working; a few hours later, it reached the iOS initial setup screen. The next day, October 25, it was announced on X that the refresh rate of both screens had increased from the original 3–10 FPS to 37 FPS, and touch was then officially usable.
Normally, Android phones cannot install the iOS operating system. The key to what SmuOS can achieve is that the processors in iPhones and most Android phones are based on the ARM architecture, which provides a common foundation for porting.
Apple has publicly released the XNU kernel source code shared by iOS and macOS on GitHub, and developers can recompile it for Qualcomm processors. Combined with the open-source project UniXNU, this makes it possible to run iOS or macOS on non-Apple ARM64 hardware via UEFI boot.
This concept is similar to OpenCore, which was commonly used for Hackintosh in the past. Surface Duo 2 has also been included in UniXNU’s community port list, and the maintainer is SmuOS himself.
In addition, all iOS rendering relies on Apple’s own Metal graphics API, but the Adreno 660 GPU in the Surface Duo 2 doesn’t understand Metal, so SmuOS adds a “translation” layer that converts Metal instructions into Vulkan and then hands them to Turnip, the open-source driver for Adreno, for execution.
SmuOS also requires writing drivers from scratch and figuring out how to make iOS 26 adapt to two screens.
Although no processor or motherboard was replaced during the entire process, and all changes were concentrated at the software and firmware level, the difficulty was still quite high and not something an ordinary person could replicate.
SmuOS said that the entire porting process took about two months from start to finish, and was full of research, headaches, and constant trial and error. The original goal of this project was actually just to keep the Surface Duo 2—a phone abandoned by Microsoft—alive.
Although running iOS 26 on the Surface Duo 2 is already impressive, it is still a long way from everyday use. The foreign media outlet Windows Latest also positions it as a research version, and the following all need improvement:
- The screen still has color stripes and graphics display errors; obvious graphical corruption can be seen on the contacts page.
- Some apps have not yet been adapted for the two separate screens—the dial pad in the Phone app is one example.
- The wallpaper currently only displays black.
- The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth information in Settings both show N/A, and the related functions have not yet been confirmed to work.
- The developer’s GitHub project page continues to document graphics-related fixes.
Next, SmuOS has two goals: first, to make the Surface Pen pose as an Apple Pencil; second, to port iOS 27 and build a version truly tailored to the iPhone Duo.
iOS 27 testing soon 🙂
— SmuOS (@none24smu) October 27, 2026
Source: KOCPC Chinese