First native third-party iPhone apps surface

Developers claim they have managed to install the first natively-running third-party applications for Apple's iPhone.

Two developer teams, one working from the iPhone Dev Wiki project and another from a Google Code group, have managed to create a pair of applications that don't do much, but prove that the iPhone's OS X software can be subverted to allow the installation of third-party software.

Previously, all iPhone applications had to be web-based apps that ran through Apple's Safari browser and this is still the only officially supported method for creating third-party iPhone software.

The first application, dubbed 'UIKit Hello World', simply creates a window and displays a message. Creating a 'Hello World' application is a common first project for beginning programmers. The Hello World application was created by developers at the iPhone Dev Wiki project.

The second application is named MobileTerminal. It was created by a team working from a Google Code site and emulates a terminal application on the iPhone.

A YouTube video from the developers demonstrated MobileTerminal installed alongside Apple's pre-installed applications.

The installation of either application, however, requires some programming knowledge and may be beyond the level of most iPhone users.

Installing the applications requires users to first go through the process of 'jailbreaking' the iPhone to allow access through an Intel-equipped Mac or PC via a third-party tool. Users must then download a development utility known as a 'toolchain' to compile the code and then install it on the iPhone.

News of the applications comes just two days after Apple released the first iPhone patch, which reportedly disabled many of the unlocking utilities. The iPhone Dev Wiki team, however, reported that many of the known 'jailbreaking' and development tools still work with the device or have been updated to work with the new version.