Nintendo Switch Becomes iPhone? Hacker Achieves the Unthinkable!

Who needs an iPhone when you’ve got a Switch console? That must have been the thought process of one adventurous netizen before embarking on a wild project. And incredibly, they achieved exactly what they set out to do.

Assuming you’re a video game enthusiast, you likely possess at least a smartphone and a gaming console at home, such as an iPhone and a Nintendo Switch. It wouldn’t even cross your mind to ditch one for the other since neither can fully replace the functionalities of its counterpart. But what if it were actually possible? This bizarre question might have popped into the mind of PatRyk, a particularly tech-savvy internet user.

One day, he or she decided to embark on an audacious project: to run iOS on a Nintendo Switch—specifically, the original model, not the latest one. Why, you might ask? Honestly, just out of sheer curiosity to see if it could be done. Sometimes, that’s all the motivation you need.

This “iPhone Switch” is so slow it’s useless, but it’s fun

After two days of intense effort, PatRyk pulled off something remarkable: turning their Switch into a “functional” iPhone. This is quite a feat considering that Apple’s operating systems are notoriously difficult to run on non-Apple hardware. He or she used QEMU, an emulator that can simulate different hardware architectures within software.

Now, we put “functional” in quotes because, by the creator’s own admission, it is “the world’s slowest iPhone.” iOS takes 20 minutes to boot up and it fails to open any apps at all (they all crash immediately).

Adding insult to injury, it displays error messages left and right. It’s completely unusable, which wasn’t really the point anyway. If you’re also interested in trying to run iOS on devices that aren’t designed for it, you can find the necessary tools and documentation on the QEMU project’s GitHub page.