The easiest way to get iPhone Native apps into your iPhone

Jailbreaking is the term folks are using to describe an iPhone thats been hacked to allow third-party native apps like Lights Out to run on the iPhone.

In the past (oh about a month ago!) jailbreaking meant you had to use the terminal and do a bunch of different things to hack the iPhone. This spawned a variety of different applications that did the same thing easier, but not quite as easy as the common iPhone user would have liked.

Finally theres an application called Installer that makes jailbreaking the iPhone easy to do. The folks at nullriver have designed an application that actually installs itself without needing to know an command line or terminal geek speak at all. After the Installer.app jailbreaks your iPhone and installs itself, it allows you to see a whole world of applications that are out and about in iPhone hacker / developer land!

We've played with the installer over the last week and must admit that it's the best thing to happen to the iPhone yet. So what exactly does the Installer.app do? Quite simply, the installer is very much like a software update on a mac with a twist. Not only will the installer app check for updates to it's own software, but it will look for updates to anything else the Installer.app has installed as well. The Installer.app constantly checks various sources for new iPhone "packages". The packages are applications that can be installed at anytime on your iPhone. Most of the packages are still in beta / developmental stages but it gives you a chance to play with the apps and see what developers are doing.

So what happens after you've installed an application and decide you no longer want it on your iPhone? Simple, just select uninstall and the Installer.app will take care of removing the application for you. It really is the easiest thing!

Currently the Installer shows a list of Development packages such as Perl, Python and Ruby, a few games like a nintendo emulator and iPhoneDoom. Theres also a bunch of network utilites like DNS Tools and you can even compile an Apache web server on your iPhone!

The nullriver team is constantly updating the Installer.app software and the packages are always registered and checked for updates each time Installer.app is launched.

Download the Installer.app here.