iPhone Blog

Though officially sanctioned third-party applications are, by Apple’s estimation, less than six weeks away, unofficial “jailbreak” applications distributed through Installer.app continue to enjoy widespread popularity. As an unofficial application itself, however, Installer.app is subject to some significant troubleshooting issues. The following is a guide to some of the more common problems encounter with the application.

First let’s look at some important information about the way Installer.app works.

The app stores configuration files in ~\Library\Installer and /var/mobile/Library/Installer. Here are the files you will find there:

• LocalPackages.plist list of applications currently installed used by the uninstall feature to remove apps. This is the most important file and therefore you might consider keeping a backup copy of this file in a safe place after performing any installations. Loss of this file means that you cannot uninstall the applications and rebuilding the file is tedious at best and not recommended.
• PackageSources.plist list of all the application sources the installer is currently using for installations. Keeping a backup of this file is also recommended since it contains a list of your favorite application sources.
• RemotePackages.plist list that is generated every time the sources are refreshed. Contains all the packages available excluding the packages already in your LocalPackages.plist.
• Temp the directory used for temporary file storage used by installers for downloaded content, zip files, extracted files, etc.
• TrustedSources.plist list of all sources that the Installer App trusts. Attempts to install an application that is not from a trusted source results in a warning message to the user. Trusted sources would be for example Nullriver and other community sources.

The plist files are like OS X basic text XML files that should be edited very carefully. If you don’t know what you are doing be sure to ask someone for help. It’s important that the XML/HTML tags in the file are correctly formatted.

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