The Hackers' First Hello on the iPhone

With two little words—"Hello world!"—independent developers stake a claim to creating downloadable programs for Apple's device

by Arik Hesseldahl

By the standards of modern software, it wasn't much. All the program did, after all, was display the words "Hello world!"

What set it apart was the fact that it did so on Apple's (AAPL) iPhone, and that it was created by a group of independent programmers without the blessing of the famously control-freakish company.

The simple little program appears to be the first downloadable program created for the iPhone, bypassing Apple's "approved" method of developing software for the device: applications hosted on Web sites and accessed through the iPhone's Web browser rather than its internal memory (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/12/07, "Apple Reignites The Browser Wars").

Scores of browser-based applications for the iPhone appeared in the first month after its debut in late June (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/30/07, "iPhones Arrive"). These include iPhone-optimized versions of the game "Bejeweled" and Zoho.com's Web-based office productivity service.

Hacking flair

But so far, Apple hasn't released any development tools for creating dedicated software programs that reside and run on the phone itself. The less-than-convincing explanation given is that the company doesn't want mischief-making programmers to create software that might bring down AT&T's (T) wireless network (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/23/07, "Tech Beat Blog: The Price of Power: Hackers Hit the iPhone").

Despite Apple's restrictive policy, "Hello" is likely just the first fruit of the efforts by a band of programmers collaborating mostly via online chats. These developers have teamed up to create their own set of programming tools for the iPhone, led largely by Patrick Walton, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Chicago who goes by the online nickname "Nightwatch."

Having specialized in writing emulators—programs that allow new personal computers to act like outdated PCs so that they can run old software and classic video games—Walton brings a flair for working with the Samsung-made ARM (ARMHY) processor inside the iPhone. "One of the reasons I was so interested in getting an iPhone was that I thought it would be great for running third-party programs," he says. "And even though Apple said there would be no third-party programs, I thought hackers would eventually enable them. I just didn't think I would be one of them."

"With Spit and Bubblegum"

One key motivation: While the iPhone can send and receive cell phone text messages, it lacks an instant messaging program like AOL Instant Messenger or even Apple's own iChat. To fill that void, there are already at least two clients compatible with AIM and other IM services—JiveTalk and FlickIM —that work via the iPhone's browser.

Though its capabilities are far more primitive, building a program like Hello wasn't an easy process, says Erica Sadun, a Denver-based programmer who has written her own programs using the tools, and chronicled the project as a contributor to AOL's (TWX) The Unofficial Apple Weblog. "This project has so far gone through different stages," she says. "To say it's been put together with spit and bubblegum is an insult to spit and bubblegum."

And yet, it works. The first step involved figuring out how to gain access to the iPhone's file system. While Apple's iPod music players feature the option of acting like an external hard drive for storing files from a Macintosh or Windows-based PC (MSFT), the iPhone has no such capability, Sadun says.