In the ever-curious world of tech hacking and console modding, one daring developer has managed to achieve something no one asked for—running iOS on a Nintendo Switch.
The developer behind this curious experiment is a user known as PatRyk, who unveiled their project on the social media platform X. In a tongue-in-cheek announcement, they dubbed the result “the world’s slowest ‘iPhone’,” noting that it takes 20 full minutes just to boot, and every app crashes. But, in their own words: “It’s a start.”
This may not sound like a win, but considering the massive divide between Apple’s tightly controlled iOS ecosystem and Nintendo’s custom Tegra X1 hardware, getting anything at all to boot is a technical feat. PatRyk reportedly spent two grueling days trying to hammer the square peg of iOS into the round hole that is the Switch.
Once it finally powered on, though, the experience was anything but smooth. The device, now an extremely confused hybrid of console and smartphone, suffered from constant kernel panics and app failures.
“The system kernel panics every second thing you do, can’t open any apps (they all time out and crash),” PatRyk said.
Despite its broken state, the experiment proves that iOS can be emulated on the Switch. The secret ingredient? QEMU—specifically a version tailored for the iPhone 11, created by another developer known as ChefKissInc. QEMU is an open-source emulator and virtualizer, and the QEMUAppleSilicon variant was key in tricking iOS into running on completely foreign hardware.
By wrangling this emulator and brute-forcing through Apple’s notoriously locked-down software, PatRyk coaxed iOS to run on the Switch, a feat that’s a testament to sheer willpower as much as technical ability. As one might imagine, the entire process was described as “life-sapping”, and the current results are not exactly usable.
Still, it’s a fascinating achievement. While the rest of the tech world is caught up in the buzz around the Nintendo Switch 2 and its capabilities, PatRyk was quietly trying to turn its predecessor into an iPhone-shaped curiosity. It doesn’t work well, or fast, or at all in most ways, but it does work sort of.
No word yet on whether PatRyk plans to continue refining this Frankenstein project, but they did promise to share more “adventures in code” with their followers in the future.
