If you’re dreaming of Netflix for your iPhone, good news: you’re just a jailbreak away. Hacker Knisitruck says that the existing Netflix iPad app is secretly a universal binary and can be easily ported to the iPhone with a few simple steps.
The instructions are pretty simple, and I was able to do it without too much fuss (although as a poor European, there’s not a lot I can do with it).
It’s not all great though. There’s a huge battery drain associated with the Netflix app running on the iPhone, to the magnitude of a 25% drain in fifteen minutes on a full battery. It also crashes constantly, possibly due to memory issues.
Clearly, Netflix has put aside the iPhone version until they can work out some of these issues… but with a new and much more powerful iPhone just a week away, we might see this officially sooner rather than later. In the meantime, if you’re curious as to what you can look forward to, give the process a try.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
