How To Install iMovie on iPhone 3GS

The iPhone 3GS users who are not willing to upgrade or are waiting for Antenna issue to be fixed cannot use Apple’s latest iMovie suite on their device because of lack of backward compatibility, at least according to Apple. Some said that it was an issue with the smaller RAM on the device but that doesn’t seem to be the case as those who have already jailbroken their device will now be able to use it.

Ingredients:

• Jailbroken iPhone 3GS with iOS 4.0 installed (see how to jailbreak if you haven’t done it already.)
• iTunes
• iMovie app
• TextWrangler (or a suitable text editor other than TextEdit)

1. Open iTunes application, navigate to the the iMovie application and click the ‘Buy App’ button.

Type in your password and click ‘Buy’.

Approve the purchase when prompted and it will start downloading.

2. Once downloaded, open a Finder window and use the keyboard shortcut ‘command+shift+G’, type ‘/Users/yourusername/Music/iTunes/’ as location and click ‘Go’.

3. Open the ‘Mobile Application’ folder and select iMovie. Using the rename option, change the extension from ‘.ipa’ to ‘.zip’. When prompted about which extension to use, choose ‘Use .zip’.

4. Extract the iMovie zip file and open the resulting iMovie folder. Go to the payload folder and select ‘iMovie’. Right-click the file and choose ‘Show Package Contents’

5. Now, select the Info.plist file. Right-click and choose ‘Open With’ and then ‘TextWrangler’.

Find the phrase:

<dict>

<key>front-facing-camera</key>

<true/>

</dict>

Change it to the below and then save:

<dict>

<key>front-facing-camera</key>

<false/>

</dict>

6. Now delete the older iMovie zip file and right-click the modified iMovie folder that we extracted earlier and choose ‘Compress iMovie x.x’

7. Change the extension for the iMovie zip file from ‘.zip’ to ‘.ipa’ using the rename function and click ‘Use .ipa’ when prompted.

8. Now you can sync the iMovie application to your jailbroken device using iTunes.

Please note that you can only export the file in 360p resolution, choosing any other resolution will give an error.

Thanks to Redmond Pie for publicizing this solution.

Sayam Aggarwal

Sayam Aggarwal is a 18-year-old student living in India who has been an Apple fan for almost 5 years. He has worked with ModMyi, one of the leading iPhone communities, as an author for more than a year. He spends most of his free time on the Internet fetching the latest news regarding Apple and its entire product range. Follow him on Twitter!