A developer who goes by Makr has booted real iOS 16 on a Redmi Note 12 4G and posted the video on X on 18th October 2026. In the two-and-a-half-minute clip, kernel text scrolls down the Xiaomi’s screen before the Apple logo appears and opens onto the iOS lock screen. The clock reads Wednesday, December 31, 4:10, because the phone has no real-time clock.
What is running on that screen is Apple’s own software. Published on GitHub as ios-topaz, the project pairs xnu, the open-source kernel Apple publishes, with the unchanged system software from an iPhone X running iOS 16.7.16. A kernel is the core of an operating system, the part that talks to the hardware. Makr patched it to run on the Redmi’s Snapdragon 685 chip, building on ios-sweet, a separate project that did the same on the Redmi Note 10 Pro and which Makr thanked the evening the video went up.
The video itself stops at the lock screen because touch and the buttons weren’t working yet, Makr later told a viewer. Just over an hour after posting the clip, Makr shared photos of the phone in Settings and said touch and buttons work. Open the About page in that photo and the Redmi calls itself an iPhone X, while its Wi-Fi address reads N/A. The project’s README hasn’t caught up with those posts and still lists touch as unconfirmed.
Even past the lock screen, it’s slow. The phone takes about three minutes to boot, and with no graphics driver, the processor has to draw every pixel itself. The Snapdragon 685 has four fast cores and four slow ones, and iOS 16 hands out memory in 16KB chunks that the slow cores can’t handle. That leaves only the four fast cores running iOS, while the other four sit idle. The project also lists Wi-Fi, mobile data, Bluetooth, audio, the camera and GPS as not working.
Don’t try it on your daily phone
If you own a Redmi Note 12 in Kenya, only one version of the phone is covered. Xiaomi launched the Redmi Note 12 in Kenya in May 2023 at KES 21,999 for the 4GB and 128GB model, up to KES 26,999 for 8GB and 128GB, running on the Snapdragon 685. The 5G and Pro models use other chips and aren’t covered.
To repeat the experiment, you need, among other things, that 4G Redmi Note 12 with an unlocked bootloader, a Linux PC and the iPhone X firmware from Apple, which the repo doesn’t include. Installing it erases Android’s user data.
The repo also sends mixed signals on how much risk your phone is taking on. The README says the kernel starts from memory and nothing is written to the phone’s boot partitions. Yet Makr’s own recovery notes in the same repo show the iOS boot image sitting in the boot_b slot on the developer’s phone, alongside steps to rebuild the partition table after a phone stopped booting at all. The README’s promise doesn’t match how Makr’s own phone is set up, so treat this as an unsafe experiment.
For now it’s a stunt. It shows Apple’s iPhone software will run on a cheap Qualcomm phone once someone patches the kernel to fit it, and you wouldn’t want it anywhere near your daily phone.
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