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Comment by alt227 | Hacker News Reader

But you can install other OSes such as Graphene on Android phones, I dont think you can do that on iPhones can you?

On a lot of Android devices you can't install ANY other custom OS because of locked down bootloaders. If you want GrapheneOS specifically that list is even narrower due to 1. official support 2. hardware security features just missing from the devices.

Sure, but on many, you can, which supports their point.

Painting Apple and Android devices with the same brush in this particular regard doesn't make a lot of sense.

Can you install any other OS on any iPhone at all? As far as I am aware the best Android phone for installing non stock OSes on is the Google Pixel itself, Googles own 1st party phone.

I have seen Android booted on an iPhone. It was a long time ago, and I don’t think anybody continued working on it because... why do it when you could already buy an Android device?

Also, I'm curious... can you really install an OS besides Android on a Pixel, etc? AFAIK it's just different distros of Android, it's not like you could install BSD or something, right?

You can install various linux distros (not android distros) such as postmarketOS and Ubuntu Touch on a Pixel 3a

https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/device/sargo/

I figured Linux would be available, since Android is a Linux distro itself (of sorts, at least). But no other OS's like BSD, Unix, or Windows is available. Am I to understand correctly that only the Pixel 3a is able to run Linux distros, or was that meant as an example?

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