A walkthrough of downloading Android on an iPhone 7 and getting setup

sandcastle-mac-iphone7-android.md

This tutorial is going to walk you through taking an unjailbroken iPhone 7, and a Mac, and installing Android on the phone using Project Sandcastle.

• Download Project Sandcastle from here. We want the Android build.
• This document follows the instructions under the Mac section of the README, but with more detail and extra setup help at the end.

Perform a Checkra1n jailbreak

• Download Checkra1n from here.
• Move the Checkra1n app to /Applications/Checkra1n.app (this is important later).
• Connect your phone to the computer
• Launch the checkra1n app, and perform the jailbreak as described.
• You should now be looking at the screen of a jailbroken iPhone 7. Nothing else (installing Cydia or tweaks) is required here.

Install Android

• With your phone still connected, run ./setup_mac.sh on your Mac. (This only needs to be done once per phone.)
• Run ./start_mac.sh on your Mac. It will wait for your device to enter DFU mode.
• Put your device into DFU mode.
  • As a reminder, this is done by holding down the power and volume down buttons until the screen goes black (~8s)
  • then releasing the power button, but continuing to hold volume down, until the terminal has found the device (~5s)
  • Your phone screen will stay black
• Your phone should now boot into Android.

Install Apps

• There is no Google Play Store. Sandcastle devices do not support most Android apps (see here for details).
  • Arm v7 apps will not transfer to the device
  • Arm v8 apps crash on startup, unless specifally complied for Sandcastle (again, see above link). (Is it possible to edit the binary to run on iOS without the app source code? I don't know.)
• Raw Java APKs do work, and this will walk you through how to install one using adb (Android Debug Bridge)
  • (Some people claim to have been able to install apps through Signal; I have not been able to confirm this.)
• Follow this tutorial to install adb
• Download an App for install. For example, Firefox Lite from APKPure.
• Run adb install /path/to/downloaded/app.apk
• If your phone is still connected, you should see the app show up in Android shortly.
• It should be possible to install the f-droid alternative store using this method, and then use it to install other apps.

Will this also work if the device is on iOS 15

Checkra1n is version independent I think, but this tutorial hasn't been updated or tested in 4 years so any number of things may have changed.