Android for the iPhone?

Even though Android is open source and Google has repeatedly emphasized that Android would be freely available for all devices, this is a bit of a surprise, especially coming so soon. Well it actually isn't available quite yet, but doors have been opened that suggest it will be available shortly. Android is based on the Linux kernel and the iPhone runs on its own operating system. The folks at the iPhone DevTeam have changed that, however.

Apparently the iPhone DevTeam has been working on a project called iBoot for several months now, which runs different OS boot loaders than the standard iPhone jailbreak. With iBoot users will have the option of loading the normal iPhone OS or a Linux based OS, which includes Android.

So far they have ported the Linux 2.6 kernel to the iPhone platform but many of the drivers are still missing. What they have ported so far:

They have read-only support for the NAND in openiBoot but have not ported it yet. A few things they don't have yet but are planning on include:

So there is clearly a lot left to do, but there is enough now to run a real alternative operating system on the iPhone. The team is considering porting Android, so I'm sure it will happen sooner or later. They have a demo vid on their announcement.

[via AndroidAuthority and iPhone DevTeam]

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