Installer.app

Installer (frequently referred to as Installer.app) was an early application for installing third-party applications on iOS. It was the most popular package manager on iPhone OS 1.x, before Cydia superseded it.

Installer was originally developed by Nullriver for iPhone OS 1.x. After the release of iPhone OS 2.0, which broke all apps developed against the unofficial iPhone OS 1.x SDK, Installer development was taken over by RiPDev. On 2009, the reworked Installer app for iPhone OS 2.x was released as Installer 4.0 beta 1. This version of Installer was not as popular, as it had effectively already been superseded by Cydia, which had already supported iPhone OS 2.x for some time before Installer 4.0 was released.

Because community support around this time was centered around Cydia, and therefore repositories were being set up for APT (Cydia) rather than Installer, RiPDev abandoned Installer and its proprietary repository format in favor of a new project, Icy, based on APT.

Much later, in 2011, Infini-Dev (now AppTapp) released a recreation of Installer 4 for iOS 4.x and 5.x. After its release, RiPDev reinstated their Installer repository for use with the new release of Installer.

The Installer and Icy projects were abandoned until 2019, when the Installer name was revived for Installer 5.

On 2019, Installer 3 source code was released on GitHub under the MIT License.

On 2019, Installer 4 source code was released on GitHub under the MIT License.