The best of both worlds: Android now runs on iPhone

David Swan
Thursday, 22 April 2010 23:59

Your IT - Mobility

No, it's not April Fool's Day, or opposite day for that matter. It's Google's Android running on an iPhone and it's real.

 

To cap off a pretty terrible week for Steve Jobs, iPhone Dev-team member Planetbeing, already famous for porting the Linux 2.6 kernel to the iPhone in 2008, uploaded a YouTube video Wednesday demonstrating an iPhone 2G successfully running Android.

Watching the video (available here) reveals a slow and somewhat less functional version of Android running on a piece of hardware that is notoriously closed to anything even slightly controversial. Apple has loosened their stance somewhat recently, allowing , but the company has still not allowed Flash on the device and would certainly never allow Android.

But that's not all yet, folks. Not only does the iPhone just run Android, it also had dual boot capabilities thanks to OpeniBoot, also from Planetbeing.

Despite operating much more slowly, Android on the iPhone seems to be able to do prety much everything, at least of the important things. Music, phone calls and text messaging all works as it should. Planetbeing has said that with his invention "pretty much everything works", despite it's 'Alpha' tag.

Planetbeing admits that there is a severe "button shortage" on the iPhone, being that there is only one button, so there are new locations for the "call" and "home" buttons. They are now accessed by using the volume buttons on the iPhone.

The hacker has noted "it shouldn't be too hard to port over to the iPhone 3G." That said, for the moment the hack only works on first and second generation iPhones.

If you'd like to check it out, you can find instructions and files here.