HOW TO: Get Free Tethering Without Jailbreaking Your iPhone

NOTE: this is really not a piece of cake if you have never played with xCode or your network settings before.

NOTE: you need to have a paid developer account or access to a developer who will register your device’s UDID in order to do this. Get creative, and get one. Either from eBay, forums or just get 4 friends and buy a dev account directly from Apple. ( 4 friends + you = 5 people – you do the math. The dev account costs $100 )

So you got that new shiny iPhone 4, and you got rid of your old device that was so easy to jailbreak and add tethering to? No MyWi? Don’t want to pay the extra “convenience” fee and lose your unlimited data package? We have an answer. Now its not a one click gets it done. But it will get it done. You’ll need a couple of things, but not really hard to find things. You either need to have or have access to a paid Developer account so that you can sign a built app and install it on a device. If you’re a developer, you already have xCode, and you know how to deploy an app onto a device. And the actual tethering part we will be showing you on a Mac, but I’m sure its not much different on a PC, we just don’t have one to do it on.

Here we go. Head on over to http://wiki.github.com/tcurdt/iProxy/ and download the source code. Build in xCode. I am on an iPhone 4 so I set the base SDK to 4.0, but thats really a moot point.

On the computer you want to tether open your System Preferences/Network Settings.

Click on locations/ edit locations and make a new location called iProxy. Then on locations click on Create Network and name it iProxy.

Now on the iPhone go to Settings/WiFi and choose the iProxy network. Go into those settings and choose static. You should have an IP address like 10.0.1.xx you need to enter that in the System Preferences/Network/Advanced/ TCP/IP tab. Change configure IPv4 to manual and type in the IP address from the iPhone but change the last digit by 1 number sequentially. Now click on the Proxies tab and select SOCKS Proxy and enter the iPhones IP address in the SOCKS Proxy Server Area and port 8888. Click ok, then apply.

Now open the iProxy app on your device and you should be able to connect to the internet on your computer.

Not quite as easy as MyWi or native tethering. But the best you’re gonna get for now. With a little patience, and this tutorial you should be good to go in no time. And the best thing is this will work regardless of firmware or whether or not you have a jailbroken device.