Modder Boots Real iOS on a Poco F1 Android Smartphone Using Modified XNU Kernel

Powering on an old Xiaomi Poco F1 now brings up an iOS lock screen instead of the usual Android boot animation. Orailnoor’s recent demonstration shows the phone starting directly into a modified version of Apple’s software, with the home screen, Settings app, Control Center, and basic gestures all responding to touch. The device identifies itself as an iPhone X even though the hardware underneath remains the same Snapdragon 845 board that shipped in 2018.

Enzeruto, a modified bootloader, is used here to handle the changeover. Instead of loading Android’s Linux kernel, it uses a customized version of Apple’s XNU kernel. The engineers had to create the necessary drivers so that the kernel could communicate with the Poco F1’s display screen, touchscreen, physical buttons, and storage. Once that chain is started, the system mounts an iOS root filesystem and boots all the way up to SpringBoard, which is a process that typically only occurs on Apple hardware. To get this functioning, Orailnoor leaned on some existing open-source work from the ios-sweet project and a related effort called Bergamota, generating images, resolving some fastboot issues, and then flashing the finished product onto a previously backed-up phone.

When everything is running only on the CPU, things become quite choppy, with some testing averaging only one frame per second. When GPU acceleration is enabled, the same test speeds up to a smooth 60 frames per second, making the interface feel more like you’re using a real device. There’s a small custom program called SOCZ that confirms the system can still read the true Poco F1 hardware specs, which include the eight-core CPU and GPU, rather than simply ignoring them. You can even get Siri to appear when you click the power button, and the Photos app opens immediately, however some icons and the Files app still have rendering issues.

However, the wireless radios are still down, so you can’t make cellular calls, use Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, audio output, or take pictures. So, while you can set up the phone, you can’t connect to a network or capture new images. Apple Account sign-in and the App Store also fail to function since the device lacks the activation and security checks that are routinely performed on real iPhone hardware. All of this makes the setup more helpful as a technical experiment than something you’d use on a daily basis.

Orailnoor describes the end result as an informative look at how far kernel ports have progressed on Qualcomm hardware, which also happens to have the same notch shape as an iPhone X. The technique still requires an unlocked bootloader, so proceed with caution when creating those images, and realize that many fundamental functionalities will not work. If you’re curious about the difference between Android and iOS hardware, this movie provides a clear picture of what really boots and what still refuses to play ball.