Apple doesn’t hate iPhone hackers who are making independent and unsanctioned standalone apps for the iPhone, and by extension the iPod touch, according to Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide iPod Product Marketing. The comments, the first such public stance about what are effectively iPhone hacks, were made to Sascha Segan of PC Magazine, and posted in his Ziff Davis blog at Gearlog.

Though Apple officially sanctions only Web 2.0 apps developed for Safari on the iPhone, Mr. Joswiak told Mr. Segan that his company doesn’t oppose independent application development, and won’t stop those who wish to do so. On the other hand, the company isn’t supporting such development, either, and isn’t going to go out of its way to make sure that iPhone software updates don’t break existing, independent iPhone apps.

This is the first public comment Apple has made about the burgeoning world of iPhone hacks, and it will likely be warmly received by the iPhone hacker community. iPhone hacks have been growing in terms of popularity and in the number of hacks being released, especially with the release of AppTapp, which made installing and managing those hacks substantially easier than the command-line tools needed when hacks first started to appear.

For more information on hacking your iPhone, check out Ted Landau’s User Friendly View column on the subject of iPhone hacking published Tuesday at iPodObserver.com.

[UPDATE: In a subsequent update to the story, Mr. Joswiak wanted to make it clear that "not hate" doesn’t mean "like" or "support." He went on to clarify, because some readers may not have read the complete original article, that "Apple will neither forbid nor support native code on the iPhone/Touch."]