by Jason Snell
The counterfeit $100 iPhone X
Here’s a great story by Jason Koebler and Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai of Motherboard about an Android phone designed to look like the iPhone X, right down to a skin that mimics iOS:
It quickly became clear this isn’t iOS, though. For one, the sensor bar at the top that creates the dreaded “notch” doesn’t exist on this phone. Instead, the notch has been lovingly recreated in software. The device feels sluggish and underpowered while switching apps. The camera is clearly kinda blurry.
But still, if the phone isn’t an iPhone, it isn’t obvious what it actually is. Many of the apps look identical to their iOS versions. The calculator and stocks apps are seemingly identical to those in iOS. The camera menus and interface look the exact same as the one in iOS. The settings menu looks close-to-identical and has many of the same settings you’d find on an iPhone. The Mail app is the best approximation; I don’t use the default Mail app on my own iPhone, but the setup process and functionality seem from an end-user point-of-view as basically the same as the real thing.
The writers end up taking it to security experts (shocker: it’s compromised) and then taking it apart (shocker: it’s cheaply made). Still, you almost have to admire the amount of work that went into getting Android to look as much like iOS as possible.