Developer SmuOS, also known as None24, has booted Apple’s iOS 26 natively on Microsoft’s discontinued Surface Duo 2, a dual-screen Android phone powered by a Snapdragon 888. Both screens and touch now work, the Phone and Settings apps stretch across the two displays, and iOS calls the device an “iPhone 17 Pro Max.” It isn’t emulation. The port boots Apple’s open-source XNU kernel with a custom UEFI loader, and the developer shared exclusive photos and details with Windows Latest.
Microsoft stopped supporting the Surface Duo 2 in October 2024, and Apple’s two-screen iPhone Duo went on sale last week. Until now, Apple using the Duo name was the joke for me, but now, the joke is on multiple levels. So, while Apple sells its own take on Microsoft’s idea for $1,999, a talented hobbyist turned Microsoft’s abandoned phone into an iPhone Duo of sorts.
iOS 26 on the Surface Duo 2, in exclusive photos
SmuOS sent Windows Latest photos of his test device running iOS 26, and the Settings app’s About page leaves nothing to doubt. It shows iOS 26.5.2, the model name “iPhone 17 Pro Max,” 5GB of capacity, and N/A for the serial number, Wi-Fi address, and Bluetooth.
iOS thinks of both screens as one large canvas. Settings shows its sidebar on the left screen and the selected page on the right, Liquid Glass and all, which is how it would look on an iPad.
The Phone app is where the dual-screen layout gets awkward, in a funny way. The keypad is centered on the full canvas, so the 1, 4, 7, and * keys found their place on the left screen; 3, 6, 9, and # are on the right, and the middle column disappears into the hinge, along with half the green call button. That said, getting the iOS Phone app to open on an Android-powered Surface Duo, of all phones, is impressive, to say the least.
Don’t mind the glitchy color bands and a badly cracked right display. “The device im using is my test device which is why its cracked. I wonder how much i could aution it off for on my non broken device (mostly joking),” SmuOS wrote on X.
The progress over the past few days has been wild to watch. On October 24, he posted that iOS 26 had booted natively, though “nothing but 1 display works at the moment.” Hours later, he reached the iOS setup screen, and that post crossed 54,000 views. Photos from that stage show the language picker on both displays, with a boot log overlaid on top.
It’s hard to expect more, but surprisingly, by October 25, the developer wrote that “Both displays run at 37fps– it used to be 3-10 fps,” followed by “TOUCH IS WORKINGGG,” which is nothing short of spectacular.
How iOS 26 boots on an Android phone
Apple publishes the source code of XNU, the kernel in iOS and macOS, on GitHub. Since iPhones and most Android phones use ARM chips, a developer can build that kernel for a Qualcomm processor. Yes, I made it sound simple, but of course, it’s not, and it takes an incredible amount of work.
“A person would essentially build the XNU kernel from source to run on ARM for whichever SOC they have. The iPhones still use ARM based chips which makes this possible. So its all about how much you can make compatible with iOS,” SmuOS told Windows Latest.
The second piece is UniXNU, an open-source project that describes itself as a way “to run iOS and macOS on non-Apple ARM64 hardware through UEFI,” similar to OpenCore for Hackintoshes. “You boot a custom loader like open core, and you can port either ios or macos to your device with enough technical know-how,” he explained. UniXNU already includes the Surface Duo 2, codenamed zeta, among its community ports, with SmuOS as the maintainer.
According to his GitHub repository, the port uses the official iPhone 17 Pro Max restore image for iOS 26.5.2 (build 23F84), with a kernel built from Apple’s XNU source for iOS 26.5. The firmware and Apple’s files aren’t redistributed, so you can’t simply download it and flash it, in case you were wondering.
Getting Apple’s kernel to boot is only the start, though. “You either port or build drivers from scratch. And the Surface Duo 2 ships with the Snapdragon 888 SoC. So i both had to build drivers from scratch and a metal translation layer but also find a way to make the displays compatible with ios26 as there hasnt been an Apple device with 2 screens until the iPhone Duo,” he said.
The “metal translation layer” is needed because iOS draws everything with Apple’s Metal graphics API, while the Surface Duo 2’s Adreno 660 GPU doesn’t speak Metal. UniXNU’s documentation describes its approach as translating Metal to Vulkan and running it on Turnip, which is the open-source Vulkan driver for Adreno GPUs.
Apple’s chips also use a security feature called pointer authentication, and iOS code is compiled for it, under a format called arm64e. The Snapdragon 888 doesn’t support it, and his repository notes that 29.6 million of these pointer signatures were stripped from iOS’s shared cache. “Some parts of the build by default use ARM64e, i rewrote them to arm64 for better performance,” SmuOS said.
Interestingly, he says the kernel wasn’t the hardest part. “The more difficult parts of the build you might think is the kernel but its actually the graphics stack. There are so many small things that can break spingboard, backboardd etc. Having a decompiled ipsw (that i did myself) helps to understand ios under the hood much better.”
It took two months, and SmuOS had iOS running before the iOS-on-Android wave
In case you missed it, iOS on Android became a trend this month. HackiOS runs iOS 16.5 on a Poco X5 Pro, ios-sweet runs iOS 16.7.16 on a Redmi Note 10 Pro, and UniXNU’s lead device, the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro, runs iPadOS 17. Of course, I find SmuOS’s port the most impressive of the lot, simply because it runs iOS 26, with Liquid Glass, across two screens, on a Surface Duo. I doubt if the irony can get any deeper.
He says he got there first, too. “Prior to any news about iOS ports being done on android I had iOS 26 running on the Surface Duo 2 and the Pixel 10 Pro Fold headless (without graphics). I initially wanted to keep it to myself because I wanted to show it off when graphics were fully working and I would’ve been the first to do it with a foldable. Lol.”
“It took 2 months of investigating, headaches and trial/error to do it,” he said, while also working on an Android 16 port for the Duo. He’s upfront about using AI, too. “Some is my effort some was Chatgpt helping me to understand bits about the XNU kernel that I never knew about.”
The project started as a way to keep the Surface Duo alive. SmuOS initially set out to port Linux Mobile and Android 16 and 17 to the Surface Duo and Surface Duo 2, as he felt the phone “didn’t get much love over the years.” Along the way, a few people who worked on Microsoft’s Duo development team helped him understand “the inner workings of the duo framework.”
If it wasn’t clear from the images already, iOS on Surface Duo 2 is still a research build. The wallpaper renders black, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth show N/A in Settings, and the developer’s repository documents ongoing graphics fixes.
Like one of
the replies SmuOS got on X, it is indeed funny to see “getting custom OS’s to run on hardware they were never designed to run on.”
SmuOS isn’t done working on iOS on Surface…
Surface Pen as Apple Pencil and an iOS 27 “iPhone Duo” build are next
SmuOS told Windows Latest that two things are coming: “Surface Pen to Apple Pencil spoofing and the iPhone Duo’s iOS 27 build.”
The iOS 27 build is a tougher ladder. “I am working through moving the project up to iOS 27 which is more difficult of a task since no kernel tags exist yet for it publicly,” he explained. He also has an idea for bringing the iPhone’s Action Button to a phone that doesn’t have one.
The Surface Duo isn’t his only Microsoft experiment either. He’s porting Windows Andromeda, the dual-screen version of Windows that Microsoft cancelled in 2018 and that the Surface Duo’s firmware hinted it was first designed for, to Google’s Pixel 10 Pro Fold. He’s also rewriting the Nintendo GameCube’s boot menu in ARM64 to build an OS for the Ayn Odin 2.
“I do these for fun,” he said, and that’s the best part of this story. SmuOS went from 50 followers to over 300 in a weekend, and we wish he’d get more support. He also tells other porters not to give up. “If you port something that someone else already did, just make sure it’s the best or collaborate with that person.”
“Modding communities are wonderful places because they inspire the mind. And I think the world should encourage that more.”
Microsoft gave up on the Surface Duo, but the community clearly hasn’t. Would you be interested in a Surface Duo with iOS, as the original Duo didn’t have to deal with ‘crackgate’?
