How a 16‑Year‑Old Turned a Broken iPhone 7 into an Ubuntu Server

Background

Daniel Rodriguez, a 16‑year‑old high‑school student, received an iPhone 7 from his grandmother that was physically intact but whose NVMe NAND storage had completely failed, making the device unable to boot iOS and essentially a brick.

Porting Ubuntu

Determined to give the phone new life, Daniel leveraged several open‑source projects—including checkra1n , linux‑sandcastle and projectsandcastle —and wrote his own bridge‑setup script and udev rules. These steps allowed him to install and run Ubuntu 20.04 on the iPhone’s A10 processor.

Using the iPhone as a Server

After the successful installation, Daniel integrated the iPhone into his home server farm. He uses it to host some club websites and game servers, thereby reducing the load on his primary server. The device can be powered off remotely through a USB connection from the main server, and its performance on the A10 chip exceeded his expectations.

Acknowledgements

Daniel attributes the achievement to the developers of Corellium and checkra1n, to Linus Torvalds and all contributors to the Linux kernel, and to the Ubuntu and Debian maintainers, stating that they provided the essential building blocks he assembled on the iPhone.