Notices

I'm not sure if anyone has try it yet.
From what I can see it seems possible?

I came across this thread showing instructions how to install applications with .deb file extension onto the iPhone.

On the site also contains several iPhone applications that are in .deb file format.
Here is an example app, the biteSMS application is very useful to cut cost on sending SMS. Would love to get this to work on the N900.

My question is, can we get these .deb files and install onto our N900?

I have read N900 - Changes to app manager and it seems Nokia removed Application manager's support to install local .deb files. Is there a workaround?

May I dare say, an iPhone emulator to run iPhone apps on the N900?

They are probably in a different format and designed specifically for the iphone so it's a no-go.

Apparently (i may be talking out of my anal orifice) you can use dpkg from a console.
If nokia does decide to become apple and deny any non-repo installing, i'm sure someone will create a humongous rep-of-everything, where anyone can put anything. And by "i'm sure" i mean i would personally give as big a hand as i have, just to piss off the crooks that made the decision.
But then again, the question was about iphone apps. AFAIK, most apps require system-specific utilities, like bash. For apple, it would be as easy as adding "apple-verification-annoyance" on the dependency list and kill the whole idea. Even bypassing fake requirements, you might still end up with genuine libraries the iApp needs, but maemo can't provide.
Might be worth a shot 'though

Won't work. They are just using dpkg to package and distribute their apps, they don't even seem to be using much of dpkg's features: http://www.saurik.com/id/7

Regarding the "removed support for installing .deb files in Application Manager" - you can always install .debs using dpkg from the command line (start X-Terminal, "sudo gainroot" and then "dpkg -i /path/to/debfile.deb"). But even if you managed to extract or install the iPhone .deb on your Maemo device, the result will be as useful as having a Linux binary on your Windows machine.

Your best bet for getting iPhone apps to Maemo would probably be to have the source code for the iPhone app, take the backend code, and write a new UI for Maemo on top of that. Given that most iPhone apps probably make heavy use of some Mac OS-specific frameworks and libraries, this is going to be even harder, as you would have to replace calls to these libraries with something else (and at that point, re-writing from scratch is usually the better alternative..).

Porting existing applications from Desktop Linux is probably easier. For things like biteSMS (sending SMS through the web AFAIU), the major functionality happens on the server-side, so you would only have to write a Maemo client for that service. I've even written a WebSMS client app a long time ago that sends SMS through the internet connection (although it's limited to just one cellular operator in Austria), so things like that are surely possible

or you could just read the freaking thread the OP included..

post 6 in the first page has qgil's answer!!

iPhoneOS, like MacOS X, uses proprietary elements such as COCOA as UI framework. You cannot run such applications on Linux or Maemo.

Projects for compatibility are GNUStep and Cocoatron but they're in heavy development and not aimed for typical end users.

The console applications are probably already ported to Linux.

In simple terms, you can think of a .deb file as a .zip file (actually it's a .tar, but you may have come across .zip more often) - i.e. it's an archive containing the software and supporting data files. Just because you can get an iPhone app in a .deb, doesn't mean it will work on an N900. The same as a zipped up Mac OS app won't work on Windows and vice versa. Hope this helps.

Actually it's a .a file (you can unpack the file with the 'ar' archiving utility), not .tar.
The analogy still holds as you describe, of course.

e.g.
$ ar -t x48_0.4.3_armel.deb
debian-binary
control.tar.gz
data.tar.gz

Do you have more details about UiKit on non Apple OS ?

may this help :

http://www.newlc.com/en/iphonelinux-...not-impossible


BTW, can you suggest some opensource iphone application distributed as deb ?

Regards