How to install Netflix on the iPhone 4

UPDATE!! As of today, August 26, 2010, the Netflix app has been released for the iPhone.  Check out our article on it here.

If you had followed this How-To, simply plug your phone into your PC, goto iFunBox, then to Applications on your phone, and delete netflix.  Then install the new version.  El Fin.  Enjoy!

At Apple’s WWDC event this year, a Netflix app for streaming movies via Wi-Fi and 3G was showcased on the iPhone, and promised to be released “Summer”.  The iPad version was released, but not the iPhone’s.  Well.. If you’re like me, and have a Netflix account, you’re probably checking the app store more than a few times a week.  And of course… there’s still no app.  Well, here’s how you can make the iPad’s Netflix app work on the iPhone 4 if you have JailBroken it.

Note: There are other ways to do this, (such as Wi-Fi) and other applications that you can use, but this was easiest for me (since I can’t use WiFi during the day) , FREE, and it worked on my Windows 7 machine via USB which is apparently a BITCH to get SSH working on.  (It was!)

Phone steps: (assuming you’ve jailbroken your phone)

1. In Cydia, download and install “OpenSSH”

2. In Cydia, download and install “User Agent Faker”

3. Go to the Phone settings menu and select “User Agent Faker”

4. Under ‘User Agent’ Choose “Custom”

5. Enter this string as your user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10

6. Choose Applications and make sure Netflix (Ok, so you have to come back after the next section and do this) and Safari are ‘On’

That’s it for the phone.

PC Steps:

1. On your computer, open iTunes and download the Netflix application for the iPad.

2. Right Click and click ‘Show in Windows Explorer’

3. Rename Netflix 1.0.4.ipa to Netflix 1.0.4.zip and extract to a folder

4. Open the folder and browse to the payload folder.  You will see a folder called “netflix.app”

5. Download and run iFunBox

6. Connect your phone

7. In iFunBox, browse to your phone, then to the applications folder.

8. Drag the “netflix.app” folder from the extracted .zip file onto the Applications folder

9. Download iTunnel (If you plan on using WiFi, skip straight to 12 and enter your phone’s wifi address instead)

10. (Windows 7 step) Extract iTunnel and then right click on itunnel.exe.  Select the compatibilty tab and choose Windows XP Service Pack 3

11.Double Click on “RunTunnel.cmd” (acknowledge anything that pops up)

12. Download and run WinSCP (or a ssh app of your choice).  Then add the app as an exception to your firewall.  For Windows 7, just click Start and type “Firewall”.  Click “Allow a Program through Windows Firewall”.  Then Click Change Settings, then Allow another program and browse to WinSCP’s executable.

13. For USB connection, enter 127.0.0.1 for the host.  The default login for OpenSSH is root and the default password is alpine

14. once connected, browse to the applications folder on the phone (you probably need to go ‘up’ a few levels) and simply right click on the netflix.app folder, verify that the permissions are set to 0755, and at the bottom of the dialog, make them recursive and click OK or Apply

That should do it!

Now, in Safari on the phone, go to Netflix.com, login and browse to a movie.  It should start the Netflix application and play your movie.

I recommend uninstalling OpenSSH when you don’t need it as it’s a big security risk to leave the password defaulted to alpine.  You can always change it though 🙂

If you have any issues, let me know in the comments and I’ll TRY to help out.  This seems to vary system to system.  So your PC/Mac’s OS can make the difference.  Apparently Windows 7 is the harder of the bunch to get it to work though, so if you follow these instructions I think you’re set 🙂

Thanks go to schmiLk and paloooz at modMyMi.com for leading me in the right direction with their write up here:  CLICK