Many people, when they move to iPhones from Android, miss the freedom of just flashing a ROM and making the phone feel and perform differently. iOS isn’t Open Source, but Android is, so what’s stopping the developers from porting Android to iPhones? Why is there no Android ROM for iPhone? Is it possible?
Short answer: No. Again, because of the source codes.
Android needs various drivers and patches to be able to run on a phone. Take, for example, CAF from Snapdragon. Without these patches, Android won’t be able to boot. In the previous post, we discussed why iOS can’t be ported to Android phones, that is, because iOS is closed-source, and the source codes only remain with Apple. That includes the drivers and patches for the A-series chips Apple makes in-house and uses in their devices. Since no-one has access to those lines of code, it is not possible for developers to make Android run on iPhones.
This is the exact reason why aftermarket development is extremely less for many phones, like Huawei and Honor, that use their own CPUs (Huawei & Honor use their own HiSilicon CPUs). They either release the source code too late or simply don’t release it at all.
