Ammaar Reshi, product and design lead for Google AI Studio, has published a video showing a full Windows 11 desktop running on Apple's foldable iPhone Duo. He says the project was built with Gemini 4 Carbon.
"I used Gemini 4 Carbon to get Windows 11 running on my iPhone Duo!"
Asked how long the agent worked, Reshi replied that it ran for two hours using Swarm. The project is called WindowsiOS, and its code is open source.
How it runs
According to Windows Latest, WindowsiOS runs the ARM edition of Windows 11 24H2 inside a virtual machine on the phone itself. It does not rely on cloud streaming or a remote connection.
The phone is not jailbroken. Apple restricts access to its hardware virtualization framework, so the project uses a software approach instead, executing ARM64 code through JIT (just-in-time) translation. When you switch back to iOS, personal files and apps are unaffected. The virtual machine is equipped with firmware, storage, a network adapter, USB input devices and audio devices that Windows can recognize: to Windows, the phone's network connection looks like an Ethernet card, sound plays through the iPhone's speaker, and microphone input is passed back to Windows.
For traditional Windows apps, the project supports Microsoft's Prism translation layer, so some x86 and x64 programs can run, though full compatibility is not guaranteed.
The folding screen is put to clever use. Fully unfolded, Windows fills the whole display. Half-folded, the device turns into a laptop-style layout, with the desktop on the upper half and a virtual keyboard and multi-touch trackpad on the lower half. Reshi describes the keyboard as a six-row chocolate-key layout with F1 through F10 and a Copilot key. The iPhone Duo's inner display measures 7.6 inches, which is still cramped for use as a computer.
The barriers and the trade-offs
Installing it yourself is not easy. Per the project's documentation, you need an Apple Silicon Mac, development tools and a Windows 11 ARM image, and the installation takes up about 12GB. The project uses a trimmed-down image, and its optimization scripts turn off Defender real-time protection and the Windows Update background service to save resources, which weakens security for everyday use.
Reshi describes the speed as "close to native" but has not provided benchmark comparisons, and Windows Latest says it has not tested the project itself. How well it actually performs cannot be verified for now.
A chain of ports over the years
The timeline helps put this in context. Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 Mobile in early 2020, and Windows phones faded out from then on. A few weeks ago, Windows Latest reported on another developer who used AI to put iOS 26 on the Surface Duo 2, a device Microsoft has since abandoned. This time the direction is reversed, with Windows 11 running on Apple's foldable.
What the two projects share is that both handed a large share of the low-level adaptation work to AI. Missing drivers, virtual devices and instruction translation used to be chipped away slowly by a small circle of people who knew system kernels well. Now a product lead with a set of agents produced a demo-ready version in two hours. Still, there is a long way between a demo that runs and something pleasant to use every day, and the project page does not address touch optimization, battery life or heat.
Sources: Windows Latest, CocoLoop, WindowsiOS project page; Windows Latest's report was used to verify install size, how it runs and Prism support.