Downgrading iPod Touch 1.1.2 and installing iPhone apps

This Christmas Santa brought me a nice 16GB iPod Touch which I’ve been after for a while now. Out of the box the iPod Touch is brilliant it does everything you would expect of an iPod and more, however the geek in me wanted to see if there was any third party applications that I could install. After searching around the net for a while I came across http://jailbreakme.com which basically installs and application that allows you to download and install third party apps straight from your iPod Touch. Great I thought but there was one problem, my iPod came out the box with version 1.1.2 of the firmware and wouldn’t allow me to install the AppSnap application.

After more searching around I settled on the fact that I needed to downgrade my firmware to version 1.1.1 if I was going to jailbreak the iPod. There is a way to upgrade back to firmware 1.1.2 after jailbreaking your iPod but I didn’t see the point as there wasn’t much difference between the two versions plus I read a few places that certain application wouldn’t work with version 1.1.2 anyway.

Below is a step by step guide on how to first downgrade your iPod Touch to version 1.1.1 then install Mail and Maps apps from the iPhone, bear in mind that this is not supported by Apple and I will not be responsible for any damage that happens to your iPod. Also the restore WILL ERASE everything on your iPod and restore it to it’s factory settings.

One more thing to note is this step by step guide is being done on a Mac so certain steps may be slightly different for Windows, but any half tech savvy user should be able to make it work on Windows.

My iPod Touch looked like this out of the box, as you can see version 1.1.2 of the firmware is installed.

• The first thing you need to do is to download firmware 1.1.1 to your computer, the file is around 150Mb. You can get it from here: http://appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/content.info.apple.com/iPod/SBML/osx/bundles/061-3932.20070927.p23dD/iPod1,1_1.1.1_3A110a_Restore.ipsw
• The next step is to connect your iPod Touch to your computer with the USB cable.
• Open up iTunes if it’s not open already (I’m using version 7.5) and on the main iPod screen hold down the Option key on Mac and click Restore. You should get an Open File dialog from which you can select the 1.1.1 version of the firmware you downloaded earlier.
• iTunes should now extract your firmware and begin restoring your iPod, follow the on screen instructions and wait until your iPod is fully restored and shows back up in iTunes with version 1.1.1. Don’t worry if the restore errors just keep trying it and it will eventually work. After your iPod is fully restored you should see the new firmware installed from the settings -> about menu.

• On your iPod open Safari, navigate to http://jalbreakme.com , scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click Install AppSnap. Safari should now close itself, the application should install and the iPod should then restart itself.
• Once your iPod has restarted you should see an extra application on your springboard called Installer. From here you can start installing third party applications direct to your iPod.

Now your iPod is open we can begin installing the iPhone apps. Currently only the Mail and Maps applications work on the iPod so i’ll show you how to install these.

• You need to download the iPhone apps from here http://rs75.rapidshare.com/files/61867543/iPhone_1.1.1_Apps.zip to your computer. Once downloaded unzip the files to a folder on your machine.
• We now need a way to transfer these applications to your iPod we do this by using an SFTP client from out computer. On the Mac I’m using Cyberduck which is a free download.
• On the iPod we need to install OpenSSH which allows us access to the iPod file system, OpenSSH relies on the BSD Subsystem package so we first need to install this on our iPod. Open the Installer app on your iPod and goto Install. Click All Packages and scroll down to BSD Subsystem. Click on Install and wait for the package to be installed.
• Now we have the BSD Subsystem installed we can install OpenSSH so do the same as above but scroll down to the OpenSSH package and install that.
• Open up Cyberduck or whatever SFTP client you are using and connect to your iPod’s IP address which can be found by going to Settings -> WiFi and clicking the little blue icon next to your wireless connection. The username and password you need to use is: username = root, password = alpine.
• Now you have an open SFTP connection to your iPod you can begin copying the iPhone files across. Start with copying the GMM.Framework folder to /System/Library/Frameworks/
• Now copy the Maps.app to the /Applications/ folder.
• We now need to open an SSH connection to your iPod so we can alter the permission settings for Maps.app. If you’re on Mac simply open a Terminal window and type

  SSH [enter your iPods IP address] –l root

  You will be prompted to enter a password, enter alpine and press enter.

• Now enter the command:

  Chmod a+x /Applications/Maps.app/Maps/

  After a restart the Maps application should now work.

• Now to install Mail you need to copy MobileMailSettings.bundle to /System/Library/PreferenceBundles/ and MobileMail.app to /Applications.
• Now to set the permissions for Mail we need to SSH onto the iPod again and run the following command:

  Chmod R a+x /Applications/*

And thats it! Now you should have Maps and Mail running on your iPod plus be able to download some great third party apps from the Installer application.