Question about iOS/Android/windows software

[Polarbear]

This is probably an amazingly stupid question so bear with me

Are operating systems on phones purely software, as in if my phone has enough memory, processing power etc. can I download any OS on a phone.

I'm presuming there is some hardware you need built in so you couldn't wipe an android phone and install a windows OS?

The other question is what does jailbreaking allow you to do? is it only applicable to iOS and is there any truth in the stories that a jail broken phone/tablet will brick if you try to update from it.

I have an i pad from my past job and wondered if I could install android on it as well a a bunch of crappy old phone of different vintages that are doing nothing that I wouldn't mind abusing.
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[Robby]

This answer may be technically wrong (for the pedants) but right enough for your purposes.

The operating system is software, but may be partly held on read-only chips. The problem is compatibility. Different operating systems have different hardware requirements (mostly down to processor type), so you can't install Android or Windows on an iPad.

[UnknownStuntm...]

[Rogerborg]

It's a perfectly reasonable question. The previous answers are correct.

Technically, you could run just about anything on just about anything.

In much the same way as you could lift a bowling ball with a rope around your scrotum.

Cyanogenmod is pretty decent though. If you want to fiddle, I'd start there.
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[MarJay]

What you're suggesting would only be true if all phones and devices were universal machines. They aren't. If they were, they would be a lot cheaper to produce and would probably be a Raspberry Pi with a screen.

Each phone is custom and geared towards the OS it runs. Similarly, each OS is custom and geared towards a specific platform. They have to be developed in parallel.

Think back to the days before the PC and compatible dominance in computers, and imagine trying to run a Spectrum game on a C64, or an Amiga game on an Acorn Archimedes. It won't work.

Phones are probably more similar in the sense that globalisation has meant more standard components are available, and as mentioned before it may be possible to hack an OS to run on an opposing platform, but it depends on a lot of things being in place, and quite a lot of technical skill. The iPhone in particular is probably crammed with custom chips to do various things which won't be supported on other operating systems.

I'm fairly sure lots of phones use the ARM chip, which is based on something designed by Acorn, and comes from the development of the RISC chip which appeared in the Acorn Archimedes. See what I did there?
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[J.M.]

I am not knowledgable about Windows and iOS, but I've a fair amount of experience with Android.

Android is nice to talk about with your question, because Android is designed in such a way that it can run on a wide array of devices.

Take a look at this image:

https://image.slidesharecdn.com/android-os-driver-hal-r2-091009031110-phpapp01/95/android-hal-introduction-libhardware-and-its-legacy-5-728.jpg?cb=1255057901[/img]

Android provides a "Hardware Abstraction Layer" (HAL). This is basically a really simple messaging format. Everything that sits on top of HAL is completely agnostic to the device that it is running on. It could be a super computer. It could be a car. It could be a phone. It could be a tablet.

HAL basically defines a whole bunch of interfaces, telling the Linux Kernel what operations must be available. For example HAL could specify that the WiFi driver must be able to respond to a request for "find WiFi networks". This is great because the Android system can then just talk to HAL and say "find me the WiFi networks".

And this is where the difficulty for installing an OS on to different hardware comes in. In order to operate, the person who built your phone needed to create drivers for the Linux Kernel and add them to their version of the Android build. The drivers are specific to the device.

If you wanted to install Android on an iPhone for example, the software would work all as expected, but the drivers would simply not exist. You would have to make them from scratch, which is very challenging and time consuming. However perhaps some of the hardware components in the iPhone are used on a HTC (calm down, just a fictitious example), so you can steal the driver from the HTC for that component, lessening your work load.

I don't know for certain, but I would imagine that Windows and iOS do the same process. So the easy answer to your question is;
It's technically possible, but good luck finding the drivers that you'll need.
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[MarJay]

[J.M.]