Hack Lets You Run Ubuntu on an iPhone 7 Jailbroken Using Checkra1n

BY Rajesh Pandey

Published 12 Jan 2021

An iPhone 7 owner has been able to get Ubuntu up and running on his jailbroken device. What’s even more impressive is that the iPhone 7 used by Reddit user /u/newhacker1746 had a dead storage chip due to which it no longer worked properly.

Most iPhone owners tend to jailbreak their iPhone or iPad so that they can try out various jailbreak tweaks. However, the latest experiment from Reddit user ‘newhacker1746’ takes things to an entirely new level. To get Ubuntu to work on his iPhone 7, ‘newhacker1746’ first had to jailbreak his device using Checkra1n. The process after that is fairly convoluted and definitely not for someone who’s not familiar and comfortable with the command line and terminal.

If you are successful, you will be able to run Ubuntu in Command Line mode on your iPhone 7. Since the iPhone 7’s NAND storage was not working, the device was running Ubuntu via a tethered USB ethernet connection.

This hack will only work on the iPhone 7 since Ubuntu only supports the A10 Fusion chip.

This is not the first time that someone has managed to run a different OS altogether on a jailbroken iPhone though. A hack from last year detailed how one could run Android 10 on their jailbroken iPhone using Checkra1n. Similarly, it is even possible to jailbreak an iPhone using a rooted Android phone all thanks to Checkra1n. Since Checkra1n is based on the checkm8 bootrom exploit, it provides developers and advanced users with more freedom in terms of what they can do on a jailbroken iPhone.