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muttonhead411

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 31, 2008
80
5
Is it possible to do so? Any gurus capable of such a feat/project

Just thinking if its possible to bypass apple's hardware restrictions.
 

admanimal

macrumors 68040
Apr 22, 2005
3,531
2
"Porting" an OS requires all of its source code, which of course no one outside of Apple has. The best you could hope to do is emulate the OS on another phone, but I don't know why anyone would do that as opposed to just having the developers port individual apps.
 

Compile 'em all

macrumors 601
Apr 6, 2005
4,130
323
Sure, I'll give it a shot. Got $5 million to fund the effort? ;)


What hardware restrictions are you trying to bypass and why to do you think porting the OS to other phones is going to solve those?

Me thinks he works for pystar :D
 

muttonhead411

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 31, 2008
80
5
since apple is rather behind in terms of hardware for the iphone, and companies such as nokia and motorola are churning out phones with impressive hardware, better camera, better built quality, better screen, support for microSD, etc i just thought maybe it would be nice to take whats great about the iphone (not the hardware, just the appstore) and putting it on a great hardware platform.

Anyway i am just imagining, since we've already done it for leopard and snow leopard.
 

admanimal

macrumors 68040
Apr 22, 2005
3,531
2
Anyway i am just imagining, since we've already done it for leopard and snow leopard.

Leopard and snow leopard were not ported to another platform. Since they are already meant to run on Intel processors, all Pystar had to do is create an EFI for their computers that mimics the Mac's EFI and then install OS X on them like normal.

I don't know if anyone really knows exactly how tightly coupled the iPhone OS is to the exact hardware that it currently runs on, but at the very least the OS could only run on other phones with a similarly powerful ARM CPU, and drivers would have to be written to take advantage of any new hardware (different screens, camera, different radios, etc.). It couldn't run at all on either a Palm Pre or the Motorola Droid, for example, since they don't use ARM processors.
 

firewood

macrumors G3
Jul 29, 2003
8,107
1,343
Silicon Valley
Many other smartphones do use ARM CPUs for the application processor(s). Including Android and Palm. They aren't necessarily the same ARM ISA though. And the boot process and IO driver customization for a devices particular hardware configuration probably represents a few man years of development.

VMWare is trying to sell a OS virtualization layer for smart phones, but I doubt it will host Apple's iPhone OS.
 

muttonhead411

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 31, 2008
80
5
I probably have an over simplified view, because i though just like the mac os, if i had a different camera on another phone, it would just be a matter of plug and play and the iphone os would automatically use similar drivers to run it.

I must be wrong. :) would have been nice though.
 
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