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Google Engineer Runs Windows 11 on iPhone Duo

Ammaar Reshi booted the full Arm version of Windows 11 on Apple's first foldable phone without jailbreaking it.

Updated on Nov. 15, 2026 in Computers

A half-folded foldable smartphone stands upright on a matte desk with its lower panel angled like a keyboard, photographed in soft daylight.
Google AI Studio product lead Ammaar Reshi booted full Windows 11 on Apple's foldable iPhone Duo without jailbreaking it, then open-sourced the project on GitHub. AI Illustration. Upload story photo >

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Google AI Studio product lead Ammaar Reshi booted Windows 11 on the iPhone Duo without jailbreaking it, and shared the project's full source code on GitHub. The demo showed a retail copy of Windows 11 24H2 running Microsoft Edge and Google's Antigravity coding app.

Why it matters

The project shows that a full desktop operating system can run on a phone-sized foldable device without the phone being modified at the system level. Its workaround depends on debugger access that Apple could close in a future iOS update.

The WindowsiOS project translates Windows' Arm code into Arm code the iPhone Duo's A20 Pro chip can run directly, and each launch requires a debugger attached to unlock executable memory. Hardware virtualization is unavailable because Apple cut off hypervisor access on stock iOS starting with iOS 16.4.

The players

Ammaar Reshi

Reshi is a product lead at Google AI Studio who built the WindowsiOS project and published its source code.

Apple

Apple designed the iPhone Duo and controls the iOS restrictions that limit hypervisor access on the device.

Microsoft

Microsoft develops Windows 11, the operating system booted on the iPhone Duo in the demonstration.

The details

When the iPhone Duo is folded halfway, the bottom screen becomes a keyboard and trackpad, and unfolding it gives Windows the full 7.6-inch display. Reshi stripped more than 35 background services from Windows, including Defender, to reduce memory use to about 1.46GB at idle.

Timeline

  1. Apple cut off hypervisor access on stock iOS starting with iOS 16.4.

  2. In 2024, a developer booted a stripped-down Windows build on an iPhone 15 Pro using the UTM SE emulator.

  3. The iPhone Duo has been in stores for about three weeks before the demo was posted.

  4. The WindowsiOS demo was posted on X and the source code shared on GitHub on November 15, 2026.

The Tech Race

The project extends a 2024 experiment in which a developer booted a stripped-down Windows build on an iPhone 15 Pro through the UTM SE emulator, which took roughly 20 minutes to reach the desktop. Running the full Arm build of Windows 11 on the iPhone Duo is a further step past that earlier test.

The project shows that a full desktop operating system such as Windows 11 can run on a foldable phone, which could affect how users work on mobile devices. Setup currently requires an Apple Silicon Mac, Xcode and a user-supplied Windows 11 Arm image, so it is not a simple option for most owners.

The takeaway

The project shows that debugger access can keep a desktop OS running on a locked phone for now, but any future iOS update could close that route. Readers curious about the setup should expect technical steps and should not assume it will remain possible.

Further reading

Learn more about how developers are pushing desktop operating systems onto mobile hardware in the Computers section.

Source note: This article includes information reported by TechSpot.

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