Gadgetory

what's going on everyone John rhett injure from TechnoBuffalo here and I've got the privilege of being joined by Nikoli and you might not know his face yet but I'm willing to bet you know the breadth of his work most recently got a ton of attention because of this guy which enables him to run Android on his iPhone Nick thanks for spending the time with us thanks for having me so tell us a little bit about this project and what it is a little bit more about yourself and kind of what got you to here sure um well I've been I've been playing around with the iOS platform in its various states pretty much since before there was even an official SDK and I you know I've always kind of been a hacker in that regard I've always been interested in getting into the inner workings of things and kind of the inspiration for this was was just the the great animosity that exists between the two the two mobile operating system camps and I knew that kind of mashing them together in a particularly unattractive package would definitely turn some heads and raise some eyebrows so you mentioned hacking you got some notoriety very early on your first app that went to the App Store people might still have it on their phone I built an app called handy light for the iPhone which was a flashlight app that had a hidden hidden tethering feature so it had some very strange sequence to get that going you had to punch in the colors in a certain order like Simon right something like that yeah if you if you picked them the right order the screen returned purple and it would turn on the built-in tethering and and yeah kind of I emailed all the tech blogs about it and it kind of blew up overnight Apple pulled it and 5:00 a.m. calls came in from Apple Eagle and it was scary that's fun and you're also the genius behind putting Windows 95 on an Apple watch I wouldn't say genius I would I would say insane person um but but yeah that was uh that was a lot of fun too basically my what I was going for there was I was trying to figure out if there were ways around Apple limitations Apple puts on what you can do with a watch and that enabled me to actually basically use the use the Apple watch as an emulator because once I had you know be able to use the screen for touch input and be able to draw graphics on the screen yeah everyone so tell us a little bit about this so if people haven't seen it this is running Android on an iPhone mm-hmm yeah I mean a lot of YouTube commenters may their opinions may differ but um for all intents and purposes yeah you can use the Android operating system on your iPhone and you can switch between the two operating systems as if you were switching between apps on your phone so how did you do it what's in here is it emulation now you remote accessing the closest the most analogous thing to it is remote access and I can crack it open here and I can kind of give you a tour so 3d printed Rome Kaiser feels the 3d printed it never did 3d printing before took took an uber to be an H about the cheapest 3d printer I could find printed a lot of really bad kind of screwed up cases before I got to this one and did you took inspiration from the iPhone 6 battery case a little bit I was really thinking my initial plan was to gut a Mophie because they were you know roughly the right thickness but yeah I think it would have been really hard to fit all the stuff in there so I ended up just bringing my own so what's what's inside ok so we basically have there's not a lot of components in here most obvious one is probably this battery here it uses a lot of power because this board isn't actually designed to run off a battery so it doesn't have the same kind of power management features that a modern Android phone would have but basically we have three of three boards in here we have a battery charger which is connected via the switch to a voltage booster this battery is running at 3.7 volts and this board requires at least eight volts to operate so when we flip the switch the voltage booster gets connected to the battery and it bumps the voltage up from 3.7 volts 8 volts which goes into this Android system on module and the interesting thing about this one it's called the Heike by a company called LeMay Kerr the interesting thing about this one is to the best of my knowledge it's the only development board that is officially supported by Google's Android open source project and what that means is that there's documentation clear documentation for how to get Android running on this thing there's a lot of other boards kind of like this but the documentation is kind of scattered between forums and random github repositories them this way was pretty easy to get up and running with this one so once you had Android up and running on the board how'd you get it on the phone sure so getting under it running on the board was actually really easy you can the absolute coolest thing about Android that is a real benefit it has over iOS is that the entire operating system with the exception of googles apps meaning the Play Store and that stuff is open source and that means you can just download it and you can build it on your computer and you can you can make modifications to the operating system and install them on the phone so that's actually where I started and I started with a normal Android phone I didn't have this board yet I had I think I used a nexus 5 - there's two components the first one is you need to figure out how to communicate with the iPhone Apple's protocol that they use for lightning is proprietary and typically to use it you have to you have to get what's called an MFI license and I figured they probably weren't gonna even though I have an MFI account they probably were going to let me keep it after doing something like this so this actually this is just like standard lightning it used it there's a an open source project called USB MUX D that allows you basically to send network connections over lightning so what i did is i ported that to android which it wasn't particularly difficult because Android uses a Linux kernel so the facing optical like this sounds like you just made a rocket ship excited Jupiter it was more difficult than the average kind of you know building her a website but in in the grand scheme of things modifying an operating system it was surprisingly easy to get going the second thing was actually figuring out how to capture the screen on the Android side of things because you have to it has to be relatively performant if it's going to try to get anywhere near kind of the 60 frames per second magic smooth number of frame rate so that's that's another thing that runs on this is a small process that captures the screen in the background and just fires it off out of the USB the USB port and receives the touch events in and I suppose the final component is the the iPhone app which just listens for incoming frames and sends touches out the phone itself is not jailbroken not jailbroken it's running the latest version of iOS 9 or one of the one of the most recent ones and yeah it's a normal app honestly you could probably ship this app through the App Store it doesn't use any private API is there anything see well long apple with the yeah would allow that so what's the what's the plan for this was just to prove that you could yeah the the plan was really to get people talking about it it's like I said before the animosity between the platforms is so great that it was just it was low-hanging fruit as somebody who's been on YouTube for a while I can yeah as somebody who's read the comments I'm video for this so train this is a working proof-of-concept yeah ha - right could be slimmed down to ultimately be Android on your iPhone Branka the purposes with the case for sure yeah I could see this if we actually wanted to go to like real production with this I could see this being about the size of the Apple battery case in terms of the form factor and once it's running is it fully functioning Android yeah more or less um there are certain things that don't work there's no camera it but other than that these lose limitations that could be overcome probably yeah there's no cellular modem in it either but you don't really need that because you can just use your phone yeah thank you very much really appreciate it that's what the thanks for having me now that you guys know what went into this assume you want to see it actually work we've a whole video detailing this actually running seeing Android running on an iPhone is like seeing a cat with a dog tail it is incredible to see and the fact that it's actually working on an on jailbroken iPhone is like magic you want to see that link to it down below we'll link it up here to check out Nick thank you again for the time I really appreciate it psychic