Some weeks ago share here on the blog the news about the news of the arrival of Checkr1an to Linux, with which we can Jailbreak Apple devices in a very simple way. Now, the initiative of a project has been announced which claims to exploit the bug that Checkra1n uses to be able to install Android or Linux on iPhone, iPod and ipad.
This project is called Sandcastle and it was released a few days ago. This project is just beginning but even so already has quite an important advance Well, it is already possible to install Android on some Apple devices, of which the iPhone 7 is he has "more stability" in theory since it still has many aspects to polish.
The project also provides limited support for iPod Touch 7G and transfer to various iPhone 6, 8, X, 11 and iPod Touch 6G models is ongoing.
About Sandcastle
Development leads Cable a team that developed the iPhone Linux project ten years ago and now working on Corellium, a cloud service with a virtual environment with iOS for developers. Last year, Apple filed a lawsuit against Corellium for bypassing iOS protection and device binding (jailbreak).
The goal of the development is to provide iPhone users with the freedom to choose a platform and get rid of Apple-imposed restrictions and ties on computers. According to the developers of the project, the owner of the equipment is the user who bought the phone, not Apple, so he can install any operating system on the device.
Builds are in testing phase And as we mentioned, they don't cover some features, for example sound, camera, GPU acceleration, calls via mobile operators are not supported, among other things.
For example, the following features can now be used on the iPhone 7- Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Display Output, Multi-Touch, Power Management, I2C, SPI, USB, AIC, NAND Flash, APCIe, DART, and the Tristar Charge Management Chip. Compared to the iPhone 7, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and multi-touch are not available at Sandcastle on iPod Touch 7G.
In order to remove the protection that binds the device to Apple firmware, checkra1n is used to be able to jailbreak.
Subsequently the firmware is downloaded directly from the Flash device and is stored using the standard APFS file system (a new partition is created), allowing Sandcastle to coexist with iOS.
The original iOS firmware is saved y anytime the user can reboot the device of their choice in an environment with iOS or Android.
To access the APFS file system, a modified linux-apfs driver is used, enhanced with support for parallel mounting of subsections and the ability to work with compressed files.
Although the APFS implementation used supports recording mode, this mode is still experimental and by default, partitions are mounted in read-only mode (data in Android environment is not saved and is lost after reboot).
The project uses a modified Linux kernel to build a Linux system environment, in addition to using buildroot.
The Android environment is based on the Android 10 platform. By default, the OpenLauncher home screen and Signal Messenger are pre-installed.
To install Android applications, it is proposed to use the adb utility, in addition to Java APKs are supported. APK packages with executable code for ARMv8 require rebuilding (the packages for ARMv7 are not supported).
Download
Finally for those interested in being able to try this proposal, you can find Sandcastle's installation instructions In the following link.
A "README.txt" file located inside the zip files is provided offered for download. (After installing checkra1n, copy the setup.sh, loadlinux.c and Android.lzma files to the computer and then run setup.sh, build loadlinux, and run "loadlinux Android.lzma dtbpack").