Android can work on just about anything – phones, watches, TVs, cars, microwaves, Nintendo Switch – but one thing it hasn’t been able to work with for a long time is the iPhone. A third-party effort called Project Sandcastle aims to change that and create Android for the iPhone. The group already has beta versions for the iPhone 7 and 7+.
You may remember, many years ago, that a Linux and Android port on the iPhone was being prepared for the original iPhone. This project is presented to you by David Wang and Chris Wade, the same people who made this port of origin. Wang and Wade are the co-founders of Corellium, a company that is currently being sued by Apple for selling access to virtual machines that run iOS. The two say that the virtual machine and debugging of Corellium’s iPhone helped the project get started quickly.
Android ports often benefit from a strong increase in development thanks to the shared hardware of the ARM ecosystem. Something like the Nintendo Switch wouldn’t normally have a piece of Android code preexisting in its name, but the Switch’s Nvidia Tegra SoC is also used in Android devices, and this shared hardware means there’s already a base of considerable code to start with. This is true of most devices, as Qualcomm, Nvidia, Mediatek and others all sell their SoC to a large consumer base. If you want to port Android to something, a good first step is to find another device with similar hardware that already works Android and start with this code base. This strategy doesn’t work for the iPhone, however, it has an Apple SoC, which is only used in Apple devices, so there really is no pre-existing Android code to work from. You have to write drivers from scratch.
“The big challenge was that Apple hardware is both undocumented and non-standard,” said Wang to Forbes. “Our team knows more about it than most other Apple, but we still have to do a lot of work to create drivers for it.”
The versions are labeled “beta” at this time, and the status page profiles an extremely early version. The construction of the iPhone 7 is the most advanced, and although the page says that the processor, storage, display, and touch screen work, things like the GPU, camera, Bluetooth, l and cell phones don’t. There’s enough work to get started, but don’t expect a lot of features. The status page ranges from iPhone 6 to 11 Pro, but most builds don’t have access to storage, and many lack a working display. There is still a lot of work to do.
The project has only been underway “for less than a month,” according to the site. Having a working beta in this time frame is impressive, so hopefully we will see more progress soon.
