The short story is that Cydia—the other non-official iPhone app installer—won the battle against Installer. Installer was the first pretty application installer to appear for the iPhone, but Cydia became more popular over the last few months. Ripdev—which was involved in the project since version 3—says that the Installer repositories will be available until July 1st, 2009.

But fear not, my young apprentices, because we still have Cydia and Icy, which is an iPhone app installer that plugs into Cydia directories—incidentally, made by the same guys who did Installer. [Ripdev]

Ripdev’s InstallerApp makes installing third-party jailbreak applications on your iPhone slightly easier, by eliminating the need to jailbreak your iPhone at all. You just need to pay $US7 for the privilege.

The process works by installing an app onto your iPhone that’s not quite jailbreaking, but is enough to allow those not-quite-official applications to get on there. If you gave us the choice of paying $US7 or running jailbreak on our phones—which is fairly easy as long as you have some tech knowledge—we’d choose real jailbreak. [Ripdev via 9 to 5 Mac]

As seen in the video, controlling Mario is fairly natural, though quick turns and exact jumps are difficult to execute (playing Mario with the stock controls is often worse, though). Bomberman sort of works, but in that case – and many others – the old touch control overlay is much easier. Obviously none of these games were designed with tilt control in mind, but a surprising number are at least playable. Add this to the pile of reasons we still want an active app black market. NES.app 2.3.0 with tilt control is available now in Cydia. [NES.app]