The new hack, which is a part of “Project Sandcastle”, is a third-party trick to run Android on the iPhone.

There is a way to run Google’s Android mobile operating system on the iPhone, thanks to a new software tool. David Wang and team at Cybersecurity firm Corellium have released a software hack that lets you run Android 10 on an iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus model. The new hack, which is a part of “Project Sandcastle”, is a third-party trick to run Android on the iPhone. Despite Apple’s strict iOS guidelines, Corellium claims the new software successfully brings Android to the iPhone.

What is Project Sandcastle?

Porting Android to any modern-day device is possible because most mobile devices have the same SoC architecture. The Snapdragon 855 chipset relies on ARM architecture design and so is Nvidia’s Tegra chipset. Just last year. Android was successfully ported to Nintendo Switch, even though the game console runs a custom software made by the Japanese company. However, in the case of Apple devices, things are a bit different. Porting Android to the iPhone comes with a lot of restrictions and it’s hard to design a software trick that jailbreaks iOS. While the iPhone’s A-series processor is also based on ARM architecture, but there is no Android code that works presently. In fact, it requires writing drivers from scratch.

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How does Project Sandcastle work?

Forbes used a Project Sandcastle iPhone, and confirmed the tool does work fine. The makers took the help of another jailbreaking tool called Checkra1n, which has been developed by the iOS hacking community.

“The iPhone restricts users to operate inside a sandbox. But when you buy an iPhone, you own the iPhone hardware. Android for the iPhone gives you the freedom to run a different operating system on that hardware,” Corellium’s official Project Sancastel website reads.

The big challenge was that the Apple hardware is both undocumented and nonstandard. Our team knows more about it than most outside Apple, but we still had to put in a considerable amount of work to build drivers for it,” Wang told Forbes in an interview.

To run Project Sandcastle, users need to install Checkra1n, which requires you to tether a PC to the iPhone to download the jailbreak. Keep in mind that Checkra1n currently supports macOS and Linux.

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What are the challenges of running Android on the iPhone?

But running Google’s Android mobile operating on the iPhone is full of challenges. First things first, it isn’t fully functional. You won’t be able to use the camera or install apps from the Google Play Store. One needs to remember that the initial builds are in the beta stage at the moment, so it is an early release. Plus, the early builds work best on the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus.

Who is David Wang?

Corellium co-founder David Wang created rippled when he found out a way to port Android to the iPhone 3G a decade ago. Since then, the researcher and his team are working on bringing the same functionality to Apple’s newer iPhones.  Apple last year filed a copyright infringement against Corellium because the virtualization software company created an emulator that replicates iOS.