Thursday, September 06, 2007

Applications on the iPhone and the iPod touch

With all the unofficial third party applications appearing for the iPhone one of the questions on my mind during last nights special event was whether the iPhone hacking effort was going to port seamlessly to the new iPod touch. Whether these third party applications could be run on the new iPod...

Well it looks like that's going to be the case, and better yet the conspicuously missing email and maps applications present on the iPhone but not on the touch will probably be really easy to pull across onto the new iPod as well. That turns the iPod touch from an interesting media device, to a working internet tablet...

Update: Interestingly Apple's Greg Joswiak says that the community has Apple's blessing (via Ars Technica) for native applications, and confirms that the iPod Touch and iPhone use the same software platform. Apple seems to be taking the middle ground, and while it won't support native code on the iPhone or the iPod touch, they're not going to forbid it either. Crucially Joswiak added that they will also not design software updates specifically to break native applications, although he made no promises about accidentally breaking them...

Update: Predictably the iPod touch firmware restore files have a different password to the iPhone's firmware, but the hunt is on to break the image. With that done, a jailbreak should be possible fairly quickly...

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