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  • Strange iPhone tricks: Installer.app shows up automagically?

    John Biggs

    Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

    Saturday, October 20th, 2007


    I don’t know what happened, but on or around last Wednesday afternoon my iPhone got sick and hiccuped up Installer.app in the 1.1.1 firmware. Here’s what happened. I installed 1.1.1 last week had been using for a few days. I installed Installer.app by hand, just copying it via SCP to the iPhone’s Applications folder. It didn’t show up, as was expected, and I resigned myself to my fate.

    Suddenly, on Wednesday Installer.app showed up. It just appeared. No warning, no resets, no nothing. In fact, I haven’t reset my phone — or shut it off — since I upgraded to 1.1.1 out of fear. It just happened. My GPRS also started failing on T-Mobile — looks like the Safari proxy is busted — but Wi-Fi works. I was then able to install third-party apps, all of them worked on 1.1.1, and I became strangely elated. What happened? Did Apple push an update? How did they push an update if I was on T-Mobile? WTF?

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