It’s now possible to jailbreak your AppleTV thanks to PwnageTool and greenpois0n, but there’s not much to do with that jailbreak until developers get cracking on their apps. Luckily, it seems that development for jailbroken AppleTVs is already well under way. A small team of developers over at nitoTV have already written the first native AppleTV app.
It’s not much, really: just a simple weather app for now. Barely even a widget in scope. The point, though, isn’t in the scope: it’s the proof of concept demonstrating that developers can actually run apps on the AppleTV instead of just playing around in the command line.
There’s still a lot of questions, unfortunately. How complicated is it to install a custom app on a jailbroken AppleTV? Will we ever see a Cydia for AppleTV? And what are the upper limits on the kind of apps we can expect on the AppleTV? Will AppleTV apps be limited to wimpy widgets or can we someday hope to see emulators and more advanced video programs running on Apple’s $99 set-top box?
