TheQuantumByte

I posted only a little while ago that the “Rock My iPhone” store had just launched and was set to take on Apple’s very own App Store as a fresh new independent competitor. Now, a new service called “InstallerApp” from RIPDev, the team that developed the original “Installer.app” on v1.x iPhones, even before the App Store launched. It offers several features, some of which are quite interesting.

First off, InstallerApp fuses all packages from Installer and Cydia: giving you the best of both worlds. It has been a pain to have both Installer.app and Cydia.app running on the iPhone, causing problems such as not remember which package was installed from which store.

Second: the feature that the guys over at RIPDev call “Pusher”. This allows you to install installer.app and all the interdependent packages on an iPhonewithout jailbreaking it. Initially, the Pusher app was born as a result of a security loophole in Apple’s OS architecture that the developers discovered. This has evolved to allow InstallerApp to install jailbreak apps without jailbreaking your iPhone. Also, Pusher does not modify the system partition, and so provides a much more secure route to installing these apps, which lowers the risk of damaging the iPhone OS.

InstallerApp comes which a desktop client just like its iTunes and “Rock My iPhone” counterparts. This allows you to very easily sync all the non-App Store applications after a firmware restore.

InstallerApp will require a US$7 licensing fee for full features and support. It will run without the license, but package installation (which is pretty much the whole point) will not be enabled on the iPhone. Check out the install process:

When that was done, I had Installer running on my iPhone. Here’s a look at the desktop client interface:

Well, I’m thinking that this is a great step forward for the jailbreak community, but would have been a much bigger deal back then before iPhone 2.0, the iPhone Developers’ SDK and the App Store. With all that Apple offers, few are going to write for these third-party app stores, especially since the market is very niche at this time, and seems “less official” since it is not coming from Apple. At this point in time, the only aspect in which I can see these app stores excelling is with apps outside of the scope of the official SDK, i.e. WinterBoard customisation tools (themes, etc.). Let’s see how this goes, then.