The Hackers' First Hello on the iPhone

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A program dubbed iPhoneinterface cut through the protective wall that had kept prying eyes from seeing the phone's inner files and directories.

First Words

Next came a tool called "jailbreak," which allowed them to see the files associated with the phone's Unix-derived operating system. "It was missing a lot of the Unix utilities you'd normally expect to see on a Mac," Sadun says. From there it became possible to install custom ring tones and to change the wallpaper image shown on the iPhone's display. A more recent program called iFuntastic has made that process easier. Now in its second version, it also allows iPhone owners to change the order of the icons on the home screen.

More tools followed. One instructed an iPhone connected to a Mac to run a program that displays "Hello world!" in a command line interface. Then came the "Hello" application that allowed the iPhone to display the phrase on its own.

Why this fascination with "Hello world!," by the way? It's a common first step in learning to write code in any given computer language, dating back to early programming manuals from the 1970s, Sadun says. It's also a good way to test that a set of programming tools is working and installed properly.

Next Up: Practical Apps?

And why all the effort? The basic hacker impulse: Curiosity, says Andrew Jaquith, an analyst with the Yankee Group and an iPhone user. "It's really a powerful mobile computing platform the likes of which hasn't been seen before, and a certain segment of the population is eager to play around with it," he says. "This is hacking in the purest sense, not for causing trouble or getting free service, but just tinkering around."

For Walton and Sadun, there's also the hope of building some practical applications that could in time prove useful, they say. "The iPhone has one of the most powerful processors of its kind, and it would really be a shame if we weren't able to take full advantage of it," Walton says. "There are all sorts of things it can do that at the moment we just don't have access to, like its 3D-rendering capabilities and the multi-touch screen." Moreover, Walton says, a Web-based app is useless when the phone isn't within reach of either AT&T's wireless data network or a Wi-Fi network.

There's been no official reaction from Apple, and the company didn't immediately comment on the matter when contacted by BusinessWeek.

"So far Apple doesn't seem worried about people who are doing this," says Jaquith. "But if it starts to spread and somehow eats into the revenue that AT&T is getting, they might have to take a strong stance against it."

Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.