iPhone Hacking Made Simple

20 Aug 2007

Ever since the iPhone hit the scene, hundreds of enthusiasts put their efforts into unlocking the mysteries of the Apple’s locked down device. In a short amount of time, several groups have produced many ways to hack the iPhone’s OS to update graphics, change ringtones, and even install custom applications. Up until recently, it was a intimidating process to hack the iPhone. With applications such as iFuntastic and iBrickr, it’s now even easier. I was still a bit intimidated until I saw Installer.App Beta from Nullriver.

They’ve essentially created a package manager for most of the iPhone custom applications available. I saw the insanely easy process of installing this, and was intrigued by its self-updating capabilities. I couldn’t resist, I had to do it:

Click To Play

So far, I’ve installed community built applications such as Terminal, OpenSSH, perl, ruby, python, apache, and Lights Off. That’s just the beginning, as Nullriver’s creation supports community driven sources similar to Debian’s apt-get. You can expect to Launch this thing and see new applications pop up weekly. Installation is dead simple. App. Tap. Install. I’m glad I finally did this.

2 Responses to iPhone Hacking Made Simple

Nate True

August 20th, 2007 at 6:45 pm

Thanks for mentioning iBrickr, Bwana

I just wanted to add that running daemons on your phone might drastically reduce its battery life – I was getting something like 50% worse battery life running the Dropbear SSH daemon.

I ended up having to delete its auto-start plist (in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons) and when I need it I start it using the “dropbear” command in MobileTerminal.