How To: Run iPhone Apps on the iPad Without Pixel Doubling

If you’ve just jailbroken your iPad I guess you’ve already installed OpenSSH from Cydia, which is that framework that allows you to root into your device using FTP clients like Cyberduck and Transmit.

If so, there’s a little trick you can perform that lets you scale iPhone apps for the iPad, without waiting for the developers to update their apps. In this way, and if you’re lucky, you can have an iPhone app running in fullscreen without pixel doubling, which supports all the various orientations and that even uses iPad’s UI elements.

To do this you’ll need to edit the info.plist file inside an application, so be sure to have an app like Textmate on your Mac to edit .plist files. The iPad stores applications inside /var/mobile/Applications and every app comes in the shape of a folder with a name like this (F1DCF4E2-0D72-4720-BCF1-F914B5208F55) and this means you’ll have to open every folder to see which app is inside. Once you’ve found the app, say Tweetie 2, look for the info.plist file and download it to your computer.

Now fire up a text editor and add the following strings:

<key>UIDeviceFamily</key>

<array>

<integer>1</integer>

<integer>2</integer>

</array>

If this string is already there:

<key>UIDeviceFamily</key>

<array>

<integer>1</integer>

Simply add <integer>2</integer> and you’re done.

Then save, and replace the old info.plist file in the app’s folder. Respring the iPad, and you’ll have a non-pixelated iPhone app running natively. With some exceptions.

In my tests (Tweetie 2, iStat, Twitterrific, Here File File, Dropbox, Flickit Pro) I’ve been able to run perfectly only Tweetie 2, which scales and works – just take a look at the screenshots. The other apps I’ve tried presented alignment and touch issues, text fields and buttons didn’t work and there were some weird problems with the UI.