Ever wanted to run Android on iPhone hardware? Lots of people have dreamt of doing such a thing, but one developer made it happen.
Nick Lee, who works at mobile design and development company Tendigi, has created a case that enables the iPhone to run Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow. Lee goes into great detail on the Tendigi blog about how he made this happen, so you should go read that if you’re at all interested about the nitty-gritty details. The short of it is that he used the Android Open Source Project on a single board computer, embed that board into a 3D-printed case, then connect the board to the iPhone over USB.
As you can see in the video above, Lee drops the iPhone running iOS 9.3.2 into his 3D-printed case, which houses the board and a 650mAh battery for power. He then launches the Tendigi app on the iPhone, which brings up the Android user interface. While the Android OS doesn’t run exactly like it would on a proper Android phone — there’s black bars at the top and bottom of the screen and touch responsiveness is a little laggy — the software works just like you’d expect from Android.
Lee eventually managed to slim down his 3D-printed case to a size that’s not much thicker than a standard iPhone battery case. And just for good measure, he included ports for HDMI, USB, and an SD card on the side.
While this Android-on-iPhone-case likely isn’t something that you’re going to use on a daily basis, it’s kind of crazy to see Android 6.0.1 running on Apple hardware. It’s also cool that Nick Lee went through the trouble of documenting all of the work that went into the project, going into the details of all the work that it took to get an OS other than iOS running on an iPhone.
If you could buy an iPhone running Android, would you? Or do you prefer the hardware from manufacturers like LG, Samsung, Huawei, and HTC?