Developer boots Windows 11 on iPhone Duo without jailbreaking
The WindowsiOS project supports touch controls and a foldable keyboard layout, but requires a Mac for setup and a debugger for every launch.
Ammaar Reshi, who heads product and design for Google AI Studio, has demonstrated Windows 11 running locally on Apple's iPhone Duo without jailbreaking it. His WindowsiOS project uses the foldable phone's display for both desktop applications and touch input.
Reshi shared a demonstration on X and made the project's source code available through GitHub. The demonstration shows a retail Windows 11 24H2 installation running Microsoft Edge and Google's Antigravity coding app. With the phone partly folded, its lower screen provides a keyboard and trackpad; opened flat, Windows fills the 7.6-inch display.
Rather than relying on hardware virtualization, WindowsiOS translates Windows Arm instructions into code executable by the phone's A20 Pro processor. Its translator comes from Henge, an open-source project previously used to run macOS on modern iPhones. The project documentation attributes the Windows-specific engineering to Gemini 4 Carbon.
Installation requires an Apple Silicon Mac with Xcode and a Windows 11 Arm image supplied by the user. A debugger must also remain connected to the phone whenever Windows launches, enabling access to executable memory needed by the translator.
Windows can access only 4.5GB of the handset's 12GB of RAM. Reshi removed more than 35 Windows background services, including Defender, reducing idle memory consumption to about 1.46GB. The project's documentation claims near-native performance but provides no benchmarks, and testing has been limited to the Duo.
