Netflix on iPhone? There is a app for that…inside the iPad app

Netflix works on the iPad, so why not release the app for iPhone?  Oh, because it has a 3.5-inch display?  

Bah! Says hacker Knisitruck at ModMyI who has made some small adjustments to the iPad app and has it working on his Jailbroken iPhone.

For you conspiracy theorists out there, the reason it was so easy to port the iPad app to iPhone was that it had an iPhone bundle built-in.

Turns out the Netflix iPad app appears to have a native iPhone app bundled in with the iPad app, hence the ability to make it work on the iPhone and the different layout for the iPhone etc.

So that probably means that a Netflix iPhone app was made and denied or one is coming soon.  WWDC? Perhaps the iPhone experience isn’t what the powers that be thought would be reasonable.

What’s not to love?  He lays it out in bullet points:

• Huge battery drain – 25% of battery for around 15min of streaming, drains pretty quick while browsing the app as well.
• Crashing – I suspect memory is the issue here, and also probably because it’s made for another device. Happened when browsing too fast through the app(lots of clicks).
• 3G Speed – Takes forever to load the app and to start streaming (does work though)

Oh, so that’s why there isn’t Netflix for iPhone…yet.  Via Engadget.  DIY instructions below:

To do this yourself

• Get app from iTunes, locate/rename ipa to zip and extract.
• Go into the .app file, located at /appname/Payload/appname.app, (show package contents) and open the info.plist
• Edit all references of OS version to show iphoneos3.1.2 (or your respective version).Save and close, done there.

Now, just copied over SSH (with permissions repair and a respring) this will show up on the phone. With Netflix though, it required the mediaplayer frameworks from the iPad. So:

• SSH, get the mediaplayer frameworks folder from an iPad, located at /System/Library/Frameworks/MediaPlayer.framework
• Copy that to the same location on an iPhone (I’d suggest backing up the original from your phone just in case). Change permissions to 755 recursive for directories, and then go inside the folder and change the individual file permissions to 644. (Or just recursive 755 to all files/folders on the MediaPlayer.framework folder)

Now the mediaplayer frameworks are in place, all that’s left is a manual install of the app.

• SSH, go to /private/var/stash/Applications
• Copy the appname.app file there and change permissions. (I used 777 recursive for simplicity’s sake, but I’m sure the normal 775 would work).
• Launch and have fun.

That’s about it. The way I found out that I needed the frameworks file was from a crash report.