Developers have found a way to do an iPhone jailbreak with a rooted Android device. Perhaps the most ambitious crossover episode of all time, they also found out how to run the Android operating system on the iPhone itself.
The Sandcastle project is an initiative that makes it possible to flash a somewhat more functional, slimmed-down build of Android on eligible iPhones, of which there are only two so far (iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus), where this has been achieved.
Android Installation On The iPhone Is Not Trivial
For the average user, there remains a theoretical possibility: To install Android on it, the iPhone must first be unlocked with the jailbreak tool, which in itself requires a certain amount of expertise. Once this is done, Android 10 can be installed on its own partition and used in parallel with the installed iOS operating system. When you turn on the iPhone, you choose which operating system to start. In most cases, the iOS will remain, because Android still works on the iPhone in a highly rudimentary manner. Many basics are missing, including cellular and Bluetooth support. The camera and speaker are also not working correctly. Google Android, such as the Play Store does not have the iPhone Android on board, but the encrypted signal messenger. You can use it here for volatile communication: After communicating with a signal under Android, you can simply start iOS again and blur the traces.
Not For Private Users, But For Researchers
Android on the iPhone therefore has a lot of restrictions and remains a mere feasibility demonstration for private users for the time being. In IT circles, the installation of the Google system on the iPhone is nevertheless seen as a milestone that proves that not only iOS is running on the iPhone. This is interesting for IT security researchers or anyone who likes to experiment with teaching old iPhones new features with new software. What happens to Corellium and his iPhone experiments depends on how the legal tug of war with Apple develops. Apple sees a copyright violation in the tools that Corellium develops. The US civil rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation recently sided with Corellium and sees Apple’s lawsuit as an attempt to force an unpleasant company out of the market after failed purchase attempts, which only develops tools that can be of great interest to security researchers.
