There’s a hack for that. iOS hacker Steve Troughton-Smith of High Caffeine Content fame has posted photos of iOS apps running fullscreen on a freshly jailbroken Apple TV. Of course, apps aren’t designed to work at 720p on your television. Obviously these are proof of concept implementations, and they’re not intended for everyday users to install.
That said, this does bring up the question of why Apple hasn’t allowed legitimate development for the Apple TV yet. Last year, Roku snagged the ever-popular Angry Birds for its set-top boxes. Eric Schmidt was on the war path just last month at Le Web as he predicted that Google TV will be on over 50 percent of televisions by the middle of 2012. As much shoulder-brushing as they do about the Apple TV being a hobby, Apple wouldn’t be making a set-top box if they didn’t think it has the potential to make the TV experience better as well as the potential to make Apple lots of money.
The interface for the Apple TV is obviously more limited than a touch screen would be. Anyone can see that, but it seems like quite a waste for Apple, of all companies, to be making a box that runs on the same software and hardware architecture as their other popular products, but will not run third-party apps. A huge selling point of iOS at this point in time is its strong developer support. Why isn’t Apple leveraging its strength in the Apple TV? It just doesn’t make sense. Hopefully, we’ll find out what their plans are very soon.
Source: The Verge
