Hacker News Reader

Comment by drnick1 | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that this can be done, but why would anyone want to run iOS on Android devices? A more desirable outcome would be running a free Android distro like Graphene on Apple hardware. Or indeed just liberating phones controlled by Google by hacking the bootloader and replacing the OS.

View on HN

One thing that occurs to me is this project is a way to get a fully jailbroken iOS. You can tweak the kernel and go nuts. Can't do that on an iPhone.

You know damn well that different people like different things. Very Brian Griffin comment.

It’s the quintessential Apple forum response on anything Apple related. Someone posts a legitimate question on some Apple related forum and the stereotypical response from any Apple fanboy is “why would you want to do that? It’s not the Apple (tm) way”

Having been given an android work phone, I can’t understand why anyone would use this willingly.

The desirable outcome for most people doesn’t seem to be the ability to run android on an iPhone, let’s put it that way.

> Having been given an android work phone, I can’t understand why anyone would use this willingly.

This is probably a commercial Android distro like Samsung's or Google's, filled with OEM crapware. Pure Android is far better than that and is free (freedom to install apps, inspect the source code, etc.) It's basically a Linux distro for smart phones.

It’s crap, sorry. It’s an inconsistent mess. Having come from iOS it’s as clear as night and day.

It doesn’t really matter to me if there’s some other specific version of Android that fixes some issues if I install it. As a user that’s not something I care about.

> Having come from iOS it’s as clear as night and day.

It's odd because, as someone who daily drives a Pixel with GrapheneOS and also owns an iPhone, my experience is the opposite. You could not pay be to go back to a device controlled by a corporation, and on which I am not allowed to run programs without Apple's blessing. The UI is largely a matter of taste, by now all mobile operating systems have converged to a broadly identical design and similar gestures etc.

You guys are talking about different things.

I use both, iOS for past 10 years and now Android again.

Both are inconsistent mess.

Yes, Android is worse in some ways that it was 10 versions ago.

As a user too, android works far better for me and I was an Apple user for a few years.

Not having the ugly frosted glass thing is a very big plus.

The most desirable outcome with iPhones is to be able to run an up to date fully-patched iOS on them with up to date apps for as long as the device will function.

The next most desirable outcome is to be able to run another solid/secure/up-to-date mobile OS on them, and it gets more relatively desirable once iOS stops supporting the device.

It's what you get used to or what you prefer. I have some issues with how iPhones work and prefer an Android system. But having an Android on a second hand iPhone hardware could be tempting.

They don’t come across as an Apple fanboy; they’re just stating they’d rather have the more private OS on the better hardware.

They are just wasting time, a better use of their time. Would be taking a license out from Arm for designing processors and building something from the ground up like those three former engineers who worked at Apple who later got paid $1.2 billion for their work by Qualcomm when their company Nuvia was bought out.

The commenter you are responding to asked a perfectly valid question. I found your response and attack to them quite out of place.

For that warm feeling you get, when Apple turns their legal lasers on you.

The cheapest way to heat your home this winter is to accrue so many cease and desist letters you can use them as fuel!

to finally have a Blue iMessage bubble in your group texts

That likely doesn't work because they require device attestation to access imessage. It's what killed beeper mini too.

Stolen valor!

iOS is the best part of an iPhone, just like MacOS is the best part of a Mac. Android phones are cheaper than iPhones, so why not? The Android hardware is quite nice many times.

Is that really true? When Apple came out with the original 2006 MacPro, it was the best computer to run Windows. When the TrashCan came out, there was a specific issue with Resolve that disappeared when booted into Windows. Apple blamed DaVinci, DaVinci blamed Nvidia, Nvidia blamed Apple.

I'm not suggesting I like Windows or anything nonsensical like that, but I'm just suggesting that their hardware is much better than their software.

The Mac Pro 2013 carried an AMD D300/500/700 GPU, not Nvidia.

doh! I so don't think about AMD that I even forget when they are actually used and forget they even exist. But of course it should have felt weird using Apple/Nvidea in the same breath

There were quite a few: the Mac Pro before it (which is why you may be confused) til 2012, iMacs and MacBooks til 2014.

And before that, PowerMacs and PowerBooks.

Then Nvidia got into a feud over Samsung, Qualcomm, and indirectly Apple via PowerVR making their own GPUs so Apple ragequit and gave them the finger, culminating in refusing to sign third-party Nvidia drivers.

In comparison to who?, because the competition is lagging see the new Surface laptop by Microsoft/Nvidia which is the second or third effort by Microsoft? the previous version with Qualcomm has been a failure, Apple currently has five ecosystems to go with Apple Silicon who is this other company out there that can say the same, is the operating system perfect no is anything in the tech world? It’s iteration over time and never stopping or else you get to join Motorola of Schaumburg, Illinois, or take a backseat like IBM, or Intel.

I wish someone would take out a license with Arm and build a computer using Linux creating a user-friendly computer. After all, it’s been 35 years.

> I wish someone would take out a license with Arm

Who? Arm can barely sell licenses to their biggest customers. Do you expect smaller businesses to pay for the ISA license, or core IP?

Not really, the hw from apple is much better than android hw, like A18 compare with SG8 or M1 vs x86. the software itself is mostly worst than android.

I can give you that, but the fact remains that there are no cheap iPhones you can buy, but there are cheap Android phones. If it becomes possible to easily upgrade your cheap Android phone to iOS, then that would be very pleasant for a lot of people.

And many would say Microsoft Windows, Android and Linux are well, not that good, someone who remembers all those other vertical computer companies from the 1980s to early 1990s who had a OS to go with in-house hardware and I’m afraid that’s where Apple has the others beat the integration of the two is where it’s at, parasitically hanging off someone else’s hardware, is not going get the job done not against Apple. or anyone else that chooses to go down the same path, and I don’t mean parasitically hanging off someone else’s hardware.

Those vertical computer companies died for a reason. The Mac is less profitable than Apple's software and service segment, and macOS itself is a minority in every market.

For all the success this strategy found in the mobile market, it's just as fruitless for server\PC as it was in the 1990s.

Can't disagree more, but heh :-)

> iOS is the best part of an iPhone, just like MacOS is the best part of a Mac.

This is a very hot take. I think you'll find quite a lot of people are unhappy with the state of the two OSes, while still regarding the hardware as best-in-class

Some of the people in the tech crowd may feel that way. In regular person land it’s very hard to beat Apple. A company that designs the OS and the hardware together as one wins out and if it was easy, more companies would have done it over the years.

It certainly is taking a whole bunch of people a lot of time to produce something better and I’m sorry, Windows and Microsoft aren’t it in the mid 80s in the early 90s there were many in some cases, better solutions by several vertical computer companies not saying all of them were better, but you can’t beat designing the operating system and the hardware under one roof again parasitically hanging off someone else’s hardware equals a bad, poorly performing solution.

That's not been the case for quite a while. Every MacOS release for the last few years results in a choir of "just take a break to fix the bugs". Every new release breaks something about the UX, system crashing bugs are not fixed, old features are restricted and deprecated without replacements (sandbox?), the open sources are published incomplete and impossible to compile, silly user restrictions are in place (want to add a codec or fix the BT stack? lol, not allowed), etc. etc.

MacOS is a practically enforced part of Mac. I'd love to get rid of it because it's not even good.

It's easy for you to get rid off MacOS: Buy a different computer.

In relation to the rest of your comment: Yes, MacOS and iOS sucks. All the alternatives suck twice as bad. Which is why somebody might want to upgrade their phone to iOS.

If you're making decisions, it's easy. If the whole company is standardised in their dev environment, you get a MacBook and that's it. Which, to be clear, makes sense in terms of proper fleet management. But I'd love to have a Linux laptop at work instead. (No, Asahi is not an option for managed devices. VMs are also not good enough to use as the main desktop)

I would say it’s the combination of iOS, MacOS, and the other three Apple OSs (ecosystems) and Apple Silicon is what puts Apple ahead of Microsoft, AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Google.

You're on a website called "hacker" news. Inclined to downvote so that this doesn't take up conversation space.

It's not about we should or not, it's about we could or not

Reply on news.ycombinator.com