I've been using Altstore for a while. I just have a Windows VM on my existing Proxmox server running Altserver and never have to worry about it. My primary use-case is a third party YouTube client that integrates ad blocking and SponsorBlock-- it saves me a huge amount of time and frustration when using YouTube.
Why not jailbreak? I want to remain on the latest iOS software, and generally speaking, hardware. Jailbreaking is just not an option for me if I want to stay up to date and I don't want to deal with tethered jailbreaks, which seem to be more common for the latest release versions.
You can get sponsor and ad free YouTube through the App Store.
I prefer to avoid sideloading modified versions of the official iOS apps. That feels unsafe to run untrusted code, and I personally don’t want to review the code myself or build from source if that’s even possible.
There is no need to fuss with all of that, when there are plenty of good options on the AppStore.
Yatte [1] is a third party client built from scratch in swift ui. It can connect either Piped or Invidous servers. It’s available on all Apple platforms included tvOS. It runs way better than the official YouTube app.
Safari Extensions - I prefer watching YouTube in the browser. These extensions are universal AppStore purchases and work just as well on mobile as they do on desktop Safari.
Vinegar [2] is a Safari extension that blocks YouTube ads and replaces the player with the default WebKit html player. It makes using YouTube in the browser so much more tolerable. It’s helpful to have when you want to watch videos in 4K - something most Invidious or Piped servers struggle with.
SponsorBlock [3] also has an official Safari extension available.
How well do these apps work with livestreams? That's been YT's secret sauce for me personally. While their player isn't perfect, the way that YT handles livestreams is far and away its most valuable feature. No other platform will allow you to pause a stream, walk away for 2 hours, and come back and let you press play where you left off. On mobile and desktop, it works great. I've had more issues with the YT player on Apple TV but I don't tend to pause streams with that device.
Vinegar has no issues with livestreams. I haven't tested Yattee, but it is being actively developed. Please report any bugs on the github page https://github.com/yattee/yattee
Yeah you can blame Apple for that one. It's straight up non-viable to put up F/OSS apps into the app store. On a basic level, the GPL is incompatible with their codesigning processes and they have no intent of changing that (VLC ran into this wall several times until they managed to work around it).
Putting that one aside (GPL is hardly the only license on the OSS field after all), the App Store model is just plainly too prohibitively expensive to publish a FOSS app for unless you're planning to maximize value. It costs 100 USD every year to just keep an app published (they charge this via their dev license). With F/OSS, budgets often are almost non-existent, so those operational expenses aren't made since they're not justifiable from a hobbyist, donation-funded perspective.
This is also why the platform has so many money-sucking timewasting "games" to be clear. Apple created a perverse incentive to basically ruin the App Store with stuff that extracts as much money as possible, then started selling people a separate subscription service to actually get games people do want to use.[0]
By contrast, the Google Play Store (Androids closest equivalent, albeit slightly different since Android has a far more open model[1]) is just a single 25 USD fee to prove you're a real human and after that there's no financial barriers.
[0]: Thats what Apple Arcade is.
[1]: The one difference between the Play Store and a third party apk installer is that the Play Store gets to ignore the installation request popup. This can be circumvented with root and apparently Google is changing this process to make it uniform when the Digital Markets Act goes into effect.
Oh really? SponsorBlock is without a doubt one of the more popular OSS applications out there, yet the Patreon of its creator barely breaks the 200$ mark[0], which isn't even enough to sustain server costs for just the WebExtension version (source: same Patreon linked before). People just don't donate to FOSS, corporations do[1] and no corporation wants to fund something like SponsorBlock since it's existence is arguably anti-corporate (I'm not the ideologue for that spiel though, sorry to burst that bubble).
The 100$ yearly publishing fee just straight up is a wall that prevents the OSS iOS ecosystem from thriving. It's just high enough that it's hard to justify putting an App out there unless you want to make a profit from it.
$100/year might be nothing for a business, but not a hobbyist.
They had to dual license the iOS version of VLC to get it on the App Store:
> VLC for iOS is bi-licensed under the Mozilla Public License Version 2 as well as the GNU General Public License Version 2 or later. You can modify or redistribute its sources under the conditions of these licenses. Note that additional terms apply for trademarks owned by the VideoLAN association.
> While Ajay may have written sponsorblock, the database it uses is crowdsourced. Charging money for access feels wrong to me.
From the comments in the AppStore:
> Developer Response ,
> Appreciate the concern, but yes it is me uploading it here on my own will. I needed to pay the 100$/year apple fee and buy a mac to compile the extension
Seems only fair to me. Publishing on the AppStore has costs.
Thanks, I had no idea Vinegar existed. The default embedded Youtube player is awful and had me using other browsers to avoid it, none of which I find very good. You’ve made Safari on my iPad usable again.
> it saves me a huge amount of time and frustration when using YouTube.
It doesn't have "sponsor block" but it seems like a lot less of a hassle would be to use YouTube Premium. One of the few subscriptions I think are worth the money.
I’m tempted by YouTube Premium, but at £12/month in the UK it seems so expensive. Thats around double what I pay for Apple TV+, Amazon Prime, or Spotify!
I also don’t really want to use ad blockers with YouTube, because I do want to support the small content creators I watch. But the volume of ads (and especially the unskippable ones!) is getting out of control at times, particularly in the app.
If they brought out a “YouTube Premium lite” or whatever at £6 a month I’d be in.
Does YouTube premium also include ad free YouTube music like it does in the USA? I don't subscribe to a music service like Spotify because my YouTube premium subscription covers both.
Sometimes a friend (you doesn't subscribe to YouTube premium) will show me a YouTube video on their device. I find it impossible to watch YouTube without a subscription. I don't understand how the average user can tolerate the amount of ads.
I'm sort of happy that average joe shmoe can tolerate using youtube with the ads, because if everyone couldn't tolerate them as much as I can't tolerate them, then youtube would not exist.
Even if you pay for youtube you get the sponsor spiels within the videos.
I wouldn't use youtube at all without sponsorblock.
I just don't like the algorithmic sorting that YT Premium does for me. I keep losing the stuff I want to watch, and it keeps ramming crap in front of me.
I tried the free month, and ran screaming. No way.
I have no problems at all, paying for streaming (I pay for quite a few channels). I just didn't like the YT Premium user experience. I suspect, if I was a lot younger, I might like it more.
It's not available in the US either. The latest list I can find says it's being tested in Belgium, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, and Luxembourg.
When doing those vpn tricks to get lower pricing you run the risk of services terminating your account and that's something a lot of people can't afford when it comes to their google accounts
The YouTube Premium part paid out to creators (by proportional watchtime) is surprisingly high at 55%, especially if you consider that they use remainder to also pay for music licensing.
I think PiP still doesn’t work in the app for me and sponsors aren’t blocked. I get less value from Premium than just SponsorBlock + YouTube PiP. I just have to deal with 720p videos though
I love YouTube premium but the most frustrating thing is that there is no guest mode. You can go incognito but then there are ads. Which means my recommendations get messed up whenever people visit and play things on the TV!
Yep, this is exactly what I'm doing and what the "Switch Account" feature uses. It should maybe be called "Switch Profile" as they are kinda tied together.
Doesn't the "Switch Account" feature do exactly that? If I use it I have the "default" YouTube recommendations that are not based on my main account but it still says YouTube Premium on the top and there's no ads.
YouTube Premium is unreliable when you're traveling. I traveled to Turkey (which is in the list of Premium-compatible countries[1]) and ad-blocking stopped working with a notification (so it wasn't an accident/glitch).
FWIW, I've seen YT premium features geo-revert themselves while traveling, but ad display never reenables itself as far as I can tell.
Downloading new videos is the one feature which usually goes away, though I remember embeds getting squirrelly too, but that may just be vanilla YouTube.
You you ++ has sponsor block and feels most polished and feature rich(though it's just built on official client) even compared to revanced or official YouTube app.
I use them both.
I have the same reservations around jailbreaking. My only requirement was the ability to disable YouTube Shorts (I find it excessively addictive), which you can't do in the official app.
SponsorBlock, ad blocking and playing videos in background were happy surprises that have significantly improved my YouTube experience.
I haven't had any major issue with AltStore. As long as I have the Mail/AltStore server app running on my Mac, it tends to just work. If I forgot to open Mail or AltStore after a restart, the apps stop working and I need to reinstall AltStore from my Mac, but it takes under 2 minutes and might happen a handful of times per year. That's less than the the time I'd waste on YT Shorts in a day.
This page needs an app showcase or something. WHY do I want this? The original iPhone ad did this really well https://imgur.com/a/K1a6ILL (am on mobile so sorry for low res)
there were a lot of decent AAA adaptations on iOS in the first 3-5 years. In-app purchases ruined consumers' expectations of app/game pricing; then subscriptions doubled down on that.
High hopes this will happen! Not being able to install some apps just because some Apple person decided is hurting the community: Cydia at it's peak was a huge catalyst for innovation
How did Cydia protect its users from SEOing apps that require unnecessary permissions? If by the fact that it’s a niche store used by only hundreds of people, there’s bad news.
Maybe I am misunderstanding you here. But, Cydia had millions upon millions of users, and generated millions in revenue.
It didn't protect you at all, it was more of a package manager GUI than a proper store, it just had some repositories where you could upload paid packages. And generally, you wouldn't really install apps from it (with both notable and non-notable exceptions, of course). You would install 'tweaks' which normally were iOS plugins/modifications of various sizes and functionality. They all had root privileges an a lot of it was trust based. I don't think there have been a whole lot of malware distributed in this way.
That's correct. Iirc, dpkg and apt were ported/compiled for iOS and then cydia was created by saurik which is basically just a frontend for apt. Unlike on e.g. Debian, paid repositories became a thing and some of those became first class citizens of cydia, or in other words, they were pre configured in cydia.
A lot of the business in jailbreaking always had to do with pirating and cracking apps and there were alternative app-stores offering paid apps for free. This practice was apparently more common in asian countries like china which led to some jailbreaks being supplied by chinese groups funded by alternative app store companies.
However do note that this was never embraced by cydia, third party repositories and stores were used for that.
Cydia and jailbreaking is how I got into computer science and learned how to host my own debian repository as a kid before I got into actual debian and linux.
I don't know how the jailbreak community is doing now and I have moved to android a long time ago, but I am eagerly awaiting the time when apple has to allow side loading, then I might become interested in iOS again.
I'm not saying it was for everyone. As soon as you used jailbreaks, you opened a big door anyway. But it also allowed many new things to be built that were not allowed on the regular store, and in the end a lot was copied by Apple in later iOS versions as their own.
An alternative store with open-source apps, without the opening of the jailbreak and that could be verified by users, would be a good amazing start.
The Cookie directive being awful for end-users has nothing to do with the EUs actual legislation, it's a case of scummy companies maliciously trying to not comply with it.
The legislation is really good actually; it orders sites that want to place tracking cookies (Google Analytics for example relies on this) to request consent from the user before they're allowed to do so. That's all it requests.
This could easily have been implemented in any number of user-friendly ways - ie. Store one cookie for Google Analytics as a whole that is just "I don't consent", that would have been enough to comply. Just check "did user consent or not". If they didn't, then don't show the popup on any site using Analytics. Problem solved, consent obtained and/or rejected.
The reason it's so obnoxious is because these businesses know that if they start being honest with what's being tracked, they'll lose a shitton of income (Facebook reportedly lost 12 billion just because Apple allowed users to randomize their advertisement ID). They don't want that, so now CJEU has to slowly but surely beat actual compliance into them.
Nowadays you have to have an opt-out option that should be as easy as not opting in (so no more "50 million tracking slider" nonsense), the opt-out option can't be obnoxious to find and click, the opt-in button may not receive extra promotion compared to the opt-out button and so on. The only step that's not yet complied with is that if the user indicates that they just don't want tracking period, then they shouldn't track at all (basically enforcing the good old DNT header).
> The legislation is really good actually; it orders sites that want to place tracking cookies (Google Analytics for example relies on this) to request consent from the user before they're allowed to do so. That's all it requests.
The problem is that “tracking cookies” is defined so broadly that it can be interpreted as nearly any kind of cookie, and risk-averse legal teams want to make sure they have all their bases covered.
The DMA went into effect on 1 November 2022. It includes a grace period for companies to adjust to the law and provisions for member states to implement the law, making it effectively come into effect May this year with the law effectively coming into effect March next year (at the latest).
However, because the law will actually go into effect in two months, I expect the EU's inevitable case against the various gatekeeper companies to take into account decisions and practices from this May and onward.
Looking at the way the GDPR introduction went down, I expect large websites to start posting panic posts around January 2024, telling us how the DMA is going to kill our kids and poison our wells.
I used AltStore for a while, but it’s kind of a mess. The project is not super well maintained, it’s buggy, it doesn’t recognize paid developer certificates if your paid account is linked to a business, it requires a Mail.app plugin to run, etc.
There is a community developed fork now called sidestore, which seems to work much better in my limited experience trying it out.
It still requires a bit of setup and you have to set up a VPN client on your device in order to install an app, but it seems more reliable to me.
I've used Delta both with a gamepad (Backbone) and just with the touch screen to play a few Gameboy Advance games. I have an iPhone 12 Pro Max. The experience was super nice both ways.
The touch screen interface is essentially the shape of the gameboy or whatever Nintendo console you're emulating and is responsive and works the way you expect it to. The Backbone connects automatically and just works. If you want, you can remap the buttons.
The annoying thing about having to use Delta and Altstore is the need to keep AltServer running on my desktop or laptop. Frequently, my phone would be unable to find the running instance the only way to refresh the app (required every 7 days) would be to connect with a wire to my desktop or laptop. When it worked, it was great. But when it didn't, I was annoyed.
That said, it does have cloud sync with various services and it does work well.
While travelling, being able to have a rather large library of classic games to play, while using the device that I'm already carrying is a huge benefit. While I wish emulation on iOS was a little easier, using Delta/AltStore is not difficult or anything.
I've carried a Backbone with me and played a ton of GBA games with touchscreen controls and the backbone, and it's pretty great, depending on the game. Carrying the backbone is a lot smaller than a Nintendo Switch or one of the many larger screened android emulation devices that are now available.
This is all up to personal preference obviously, but having one less device to carry is a big plus for me. Game emulation is the one thing that makes me question whether or not it's time to ditch iOS and just get an Android for my daily driver...
I recently replayed most of Pokemon Fire Red in RetroArch on my android phone (installed via f-droid). It worked surprisingly well! I only stopped because I bought a dedicated device to do so (Anbernic RG35XX, which is also fantastic). So in a pinch, console emulation on a smartphone, especially for older consoles like Gameboy Advance, works very well.
To get around the on-screen buttons, I ended up connecting my ps5 controller via Bluetooth which worked amazingly straight out of the box with zero configuration.
Anything portable has always emulated well (or at least have since 2012).
Virtual buttons exist for the gamepads of older devices (NES-derived layouts generally look pretty good, so NES/SNES/GB/GBC/GBA emulates well).
The 3D home consoles tend to be a bit more dependent on the game (early 3D games have some pretty shitty button mappings in general and that's only amplified when emulating with virtual buttons).
As for emulation quality; handhelds emulate really well. Consoles made after 2000 are a bit of a toss-up at times, but generally also work decent.
As for battery drain; not an issue with handheld/old system emulation. Can't speak to home console emulation sorry.
I can play Wind Waker on my Pixel 4a, a mid level phone from a couple years ago. I imagine if apple could be arsed to open their stupid ban on jits you could emulate switch titles without a hitch on iPhones.
You probably still want a game pad for any 3d titles tho, on Gameboy on screen inputs are fine but the lack of precision can be really annoying to get over. Fortunately the xbox controllers work out of the box with dolphin.
I see, the last time I looked into this was shortly after apple closed the last known jailbreak options and before they allowed jits in some circumstances.
The lack of a speed difference I assume is down to the fact that delta supports some pretty weak consoles which you could emulate in a browser. Dolphin's jit vs interpreter vs cached interpreter in for example Wind Waker is a 10-40x speed improvement on my phone.
How hard could it be to just post a list of what's available via the service? Even the lists being shared are pretty vague in terms of app descriptions. Some look downright sketchy.
Only arm64/aarch64 operating systems I know are GNU/Linux or Mac OS X. I doubt the iPad is strong enough to run a usable Mac OS X virtual machine, and I don't see a ton of value running either a Linux distribution as CLI ("headless") or with a GUI on an iPad as an app in a window?
I use an app called "iSH" which gives you an x86 Alpine Linux distro and a shell you can play around with. It's pretty useful whenever I need to ssh into something, and if you're patient you can actually do some programming on it with vim or whatever text editor you want. Even clang works!
That still needs the Virtualization entitlement on iOS which I thought you couldn’t get if you’re outside Apple, unless you’re jailbroken and can work around the signing requirement. Otherwise UTM runs emulating the OS and is slow as Christmas.
Ah you are probably right, I remembered that being gated behind something but I assumed it was the altstore which was the thing you had to do for full virtualisation.
According to https://docs.getutm.app/installation/ios/ UTM.HV.ipa with TrollStore should give you Hypervisor (i.e. native virtualization, not JIT or interpreter) and USB support. I haven't had an M1 iPad to try it out but videos suggest that particular combination is speedy, outside GPU acceleration of course.
I have a M1 iPad Pro, running Windows 11 on that Version of UTM. It runs surprisingly well. I was able to use the desktop Version of Photoshop without any Problems (even more demanding filters). I even was able to run rekordbox and connect my DJ Mixer to it so USB also seems to be working great.
That’s certainly one of them. For me it’s more like having browser extensions in your native apps. Ad blocking, feature enhancements, etc. For example: there is no “Instagram Premium” I can even pay for to remove ads. But with this there is.
As well as some apps that are just off limits for the App Store, like emulators.
So copyright infringement. Really a poor argument against Apples policies.
People should upload an app that allows you to bypass the regional limitations on 5ghz WiFi and see what the EU thinks about banning app stores then. Because according to the typical regulator it’s bad when others impose limits, but not when they impose limits.
So you think that a private company with the sole purpose of increasing profits should have the same say as a more-or-less democratically elected body with the purpose of bettering the lives of its citizens?
That bootlicking for corporations never really did a thing for me personally — they are literally paper clip optimizers without a care for anyone.
So you think no corporation should be able to decide anything, everything should be left to pseudodemocratic EU agencies that are mostly concerned with clinging to power?
Which, by the way has nothing to do with any of the points I was making, and is just the typical hurr durr Apple bad response.
copyright infringement doesn't exist in the same form everywhere, I don't think a phone should have a single monopolized app store just to prevent US based copyright infringement.
In other news, the DMCA type rules do not apply to the whole internet and the Berne convention is just a fiction that stands in the way of the glorious EU forcing Apple to open their App Store.
The free transmission of information should usually triumph over the enforcement of intellectual property. It's a symbol of a healthy democracy, in my opinion.
Copyright (and Copyleft) is a societal concept, not a technical one. In the technical world, there is only copying. If someone tries to limit your ability to copy data by using a societal concept as an excuse, they are directly censoring the content you interact with. That's not just democratically harmful, it's a bad omen for the market.
It's so anti-revolutionary that currently-sitting administrations in America and Europe agree that Apple is deserving of anticompetitive inquiry.
> So copyright infringement. Really a poor argument against Apples policies.
>> A poor argument? To me, as a final user, it's the greatest one.
>> I agree, regulators shouldn't exist.
So you don't want regulators, even though regulators are the only possible way things like the copyright infringement tools you like might be made mainstream. Got it.
For those not wanting to go through the hassle of this setup, you can try using something called Signulous [1]. Not only does Signulous allow you to natively (locally on your iPhone, for example) upload and sign your own IPA files, they have an extensive library as well.
Best of both worlds imo. Your own IPA's for if you don't trust their (massive) repository of apps, or their own sideloaded store.
$20/year and well worth it. One of the first things I do is install signulous on any new iPhone or iPad.
Not to diss the effort but be upfront with what's required. You need to download install iTunes and iCloud, then you'll need to provide your apple username and password? Too sketchy for my taste, thanks.
Open-source does not mean anything in the context of privacy if the distributed package or binary is not made in reproducible ways, and the distributor is not proving the checksum.
There is no way to guarantee that the shipped software uses the claimed source otherwise.
Just saying, since people so often use open-source as argument in privacy context.
But it requires reproducible builds to mean something.
In security context, the source alone helps a bit more, but does not prevent intentional backdoors.
In this instance the open source-ness refers to being able to inspect and compile the application you enter your Apple ID into. It doesn't protect your device from malware you install through an open source app store, obviously.
This is why I appreciate the F-Droid process. F-Droid is the most popular open source app store for Android and it insists that app developers publish their source, which then gets built by F-Droid, rather than upload binaries.
You still have to trust F-Droid and I'm sure there are injection risks involved somewhere, but it's heaps better than Google Play's/Samsung Store's/Amazon's approach of "upload a binary and we'll send it to your users".
However, this trust problem is a factor everywhere. Every mobile app store carries malware. Apple had malware published for ages that was all injected by the same infected, redistributed compiler. Google Play takes down malware all the time.
Which stores you trust and how you can distinguish the useful apps from the malware is all up to you, but unless you're building all apps yourself after inspecting every single source file (including every single dependency, and possibly reverse engineering the operating system libraries while you're at it), you'll always run the risk of installing malware.
You can mitigate this by installing your emulators and other such apps through the App Store if you don't like this one, but the risk model isn't very different.
Seems like I had misunderstanding how AltStore works.
I thought you could install it from App store and you sideload only the other apps with it, but that is not the case. Obviosly Apple would not like that.
Apple hasn’t allowed creating new accounts without a phone number for a while, and they actively block dynamic phone number services. So you’ll need a second SIM card for that throwaway account.
Huh. Used to be an Apple Developer program subscription was required to sign anything running on a physical device. Seems to no longer be the case?
Or does the Configuration Profile installation allow running code signed with some self-signed certificate?
A free developer account has been able to do this for a long time now. It’s just meant for hobby development, so it does come with the limitation the install only works for a short while, this program attempts to work around that by reinstalling the app periodically.
What's the cross section of users willing to configure this setup (which requires the Mac app host) that want these "restricted" applications that also do not want to jailbreak their devices?
I suppose I am many years removed from the jailbreak scene so it's not clear to me if this represents a viable alternative for the regular user, and/or if Cydia is still functional. The latter of which was very much the defacto "aftermarket" app store.
Jail breaking is increasingly difficult if you want any of the new phones or iOS versions. It’s becoming much harder these days.
I use this myself and love it. I get native YouTube and Instagram and others with no ads at all. Plus, things like Super Mario 64 running natively for iOS (build from the reverse engineered source port).
All on the latest iOS and iPhone models. Never have to worry about an OTA update either.
As answered in a sibling comment, if you want Delta, or really any decent emulator on iOS, this is basically your only choice. I think Riley envisioned this to be used for other things outside of Delta, but it’s been around for over half a decade now and no other huge, significant driving use cases has been knocking down the AltStore doors. Perhaps that’s a good thing, because Delta has always existed in quasi acceptable territory for Apple, and further attention might force Apple’s hand into killing it entirely.
Interestingly it also I think helps Apple argue for the walled garden use case. If walled garden was so bad and people are itching to side load their apps, why aren’t there a shit ton more apps on AltStore? It’s not like Riley wouldn’t welcome other use cases. And I don’t think it’s particularly difficult for either developers or end users to use this workaround. It leads me to believe that really people don’t want sideloaded apps as much as HN would lead us to believe, or there would at least be someone other than Riley using AltStore.
It can't help Apple argue for a walled garden while simultaneously remaining small out of fear of Apple ending the project. No reputable companies are going to rely on a project under the whims of Apple maybe potentially killing it overnight.
I would love to jailbreak my iPhone, if only to get a parametric EQ (EQE) so that Apple's music app sounds decent with their Powerbeats Pro while I'm running. That's it.
Unfortunately, there's no SEP exploit for my phone, so I'd have to disable passcode (and Apple Pay). I did this for a few years, but when I replaced my phone it was on a newer iOS that wasn't jailbreakable.
Seriously, Apple, just make throw an equalizer at Apple Music and I'll come back and pay for it.
This works on Windows, plenty of devices or iOS versions are without a jailbreak, and plenty of users don’t want to jailbreak. It’s not exactly an alternative to Cydia either.
I really hope Apple allows sideloading sometime soon. As an Android user, viewing the huge list of requirements that need to be done in order to make this functional is ridiculous.
The only other things keeping me on android - usb-c charging and the ability to run non-safari browsers. If these things were sorted I'd definitely be tempted to get an iPhone again (having been an android user since the iPhone 5s).
The DMA will force Apple to allow sideloading (well, let's just calling it installing applications) soon outside the App Store. At least in the EU. It looks like they'll have the functionality in iOS17. I'm looking forward to a native xCloud application. I can't believe Apple blocked game streaming apps. What a terribly anti-consumer move.
Chrome on iOS is basically a WebKit skin, so it’s still safari (at least for now, apparently both google and Mozilla are developing ports of their browser engines for iOS).
Apple still forces 3rd party browsers to use Webkit to render the page. Every browser on iOS is Safari with a slightly different skin for managing tabs and bookmarks.
I think this is changing, but native iOS versions of Chrome and Firefox have not been released yet.
Discussions about alt stores for iOS always infuriate me. There are some legitimately useful things that can only be done outside of Apple’s strictures but the conversation usually ends up with people salivating over ways to pirate things. Incidentally, this is also the bulk of the sentiment I hear when sideloading on Android is discussed as well.
Pirating YouTube, Spotify and games as well as torrenting seemingly make up 90% of desires of an alt store. I expect this from 14 year olds, it’s frustrating to see it on HN. “I need to not only block all ads on YouTube but all sponsor reads too. They’re sooooo annoying!” Grow up. Content makers need to be reimbursed. YouTube Premium subscribers and sideloading enthusiasts have very little overlap.
The side loading crowd is its own worst ambassador. Entitlement to free entertainment is an ugly look. I want to hear about useful, legit stuff that Apple prevents from being on the App Store.
> Entitlement to free entertainment is an ugly look
You see it as entitlement, I see it as empowered consumers rejecting business practices they don't like. If more people had the technical skills to do it, they would.
And what would happen? Would the entertainment industry collapse? No, it would adapt and stop doing the things that are driving consumers towards piracy in the first place. The businesses that don't adapt will die. The only reason they can get away with it today is because of the prevalence of anti-consumer walled gardens like iOS and Android, and increased consolidation thanks to the informal legalization of monopolies in the US (at least for tech/telecom companies) which results in consumers having very little bargaining power.
The classic example is Steam. Before Steam, PC game piracy was an epidemic because actually trying to buy a PC game was a nightmare, but nowadays only the really cheap/impoverished consumers do it since it's so much easier to just buy it legally on Steam, and you get a ton of other benefits, like cloud saves, fast and safe downloads, achievements, social features, etc.
Heck, Steam has one other killer feature that I wish more digital storefronts understood: if I want to play a multiplayer game with a friend, or even if it's just their birthday or I feel like doing something nice, I can buy a game and send it straight to their account as a gift. There's, like... zero friction here, it's a checkbox and a dropdown and done. This can help considerably with the income gap since it permits otherwise impoverished users to occasionally receive games from their friends, and the platform still gets a sale. I've lost count of how many copies of Magicka I've gifted to people this way, since it's the kind of wonderfully silly game you can pick up and enjoy without lengthy tutorials.
It's just a very loud part of the crowd. The other part, which includes myself, are control freaks. I personally pay for YouTube Premium, but for longer train trips I download everything using yt-dlp and view the files in VLC. I've been burnt a few times with the YouTube app deleting the downloaded videos after they've been taken down.
The other sideloading example is Telegram - some channels are simply banned by Apple/Google, but on Android it's possible to sideload the unfiltered app (even though RT is still banned there in EU, for example). Yes, 90% of those banned channels are irrelevant, but it infuriates me beyond anything that I don't have any control over my phone and can't decide myself what is available.
Honestly I think the best reason to use an altstore is to avoid the 30% tax that Apple and Google charge for using "their infrastructure". Both claim that users could use alternative stores and therefore charging 30% is not an abuse of a duopoly market position -- but what realistic options do they have? Samsung store?
As a consumer why would I care? If anything signing up through Apple means I have all my subscriptions in one place with only a click away from cancelling. The only reason I moved Disney+ off of my iCloud was to get a $7 monthly rebate from AMEX.
All of the services that I’ve used don’t charge 30% less if you skip Apple. I’m sure there are examples where it is cheaper.
At one point in time very recently I had to actually call newspapers and magazines to get a subscription cancelled. These were well known like Economist and WSJ.
As a consumer, you arguably shouldn't care. This is a fight between Apple and the App distributors, if it still makes sense for you to use Apple's payment processing then nobody should stop you. However, that doesn't mean Apple can preclude other people from competing with them. Who knows, you (the customer) might be missing out on a better experience because of a lack of market competition. If you aren't, then the App Store still exists. It really seems like a win-win to me.
>“I need to not only block all ads on YouTube but all sponsor reads too. They’re sooooo annoying!” Grow up. Content makers need to be reimbursed. YouTube Premium subscribers and sideloading enthusiasts have very little overlap.
In Europe, there are gambling sites constantly running their youtube ads, tagging them as "Family" category so you can't disable them in your Google ad settings. Not to mention outright pornography sometimes.
Not going to pay for the privilege of disabling gambling and pornographic ads being shoved down my throat, it is a very low bar.
Once Google actually starts monitoring what ads they show it becomes a non issue.
Or you could pay the 12 euros a month for YT premium to turn off ads if this is something that upsets you so much? I just don't really understand the entitlement
>Pirating YouTube, Spotify and games as well as torrenting seemingly make up 90% of desires of an alt store. I expect this from 14 year olds, it’s frustrating to see it on HN. “I need to not only block all ads on YouTube but all sponsor reads too. They’re sooooo annoying!” Grow up. Content makers need to be reimbursed.
So blocking ads is pirating in your opinion?
I'm sorry, but I have better things to do than deal with malvertisment or watch the same old adverts for the latest VPN honeypot or online casino.
The fact that people consider the mere circumvention of advertising as piracy shows very well that the forced propaganda of the content mafia in front of their inferior films serves its purpose...
Circumvention of payment for media is indeed piracy. The idea that it is noble to do it shows that some people have never grown up. Entertainment is a service, you should pay for what you consume. Entitlement is the word that keeps popping up but it perfectly describes the sentiment that creators or the platform that enables them shouldn’t be compensated for entertaining or educating you.
Don’t want ads on YouTube? Buy Premium. Feeling righteous for doing the equivalent of sneaking in the movie theater is immature at best, bratty at worst. Be better.
So you sit there and watch every sponsor segment? You don't skip past them or mute them?
Get sponsored by something worth buying and I'll watch the sponsor reads. Hell, get sponsored by something that isn't actively a scam and I'll watch the sponsor reads. So long as people are shilling Raid Shadow Legends and Established Titles I'm gonna skip that crap.
>the conversation usually ends up with people salivating over ways to pirate things.
Really says a lot about your product if this is the reaction of your would-be customers. To me it sounds like people are voting with their wallets and willing to inconvenience themselves just avoid to said service.
The film/music industry survived the napster/torrent age by giving people a better deal. That deal is slowly overdue for a revisit apparently.
On the toilet it's clear a person can expose themselves to by-passers if the door is open, but I can't think of a similar taboo on HN, or even internet forums in general.
This is just complaining about "the youth these days", with some snark about how they consume media "wrong". It even calls them entitled, just like those articles about millennials!
In an economy in recession with awful wages and banks falling over, only just recovering from a pandemic, is it surprising that people want to spend less money?
On another note: content creators aren't individuals, they're small businesses with employees and contractors like any other and if that business is unsustainable, no matter the reason, then that business failing is the free market working as intended. Every business needs to adapt to the realities they face.
> “I need to not only block all ads on YouTube but all sponsor reads too. They’re sooooo annoying!”
I pay for YouTube Premium to block ads. Content creators get paid more from me than from people who watch ads. Then they go and insert even more promotions inside the video. I don't feel even a little bad for automatically skipping that promotional content. It's my phone. I'm not going to sit through ads if I don't want to. You complain about entitlement while arguing that content creators are entitled to my time. They are not.
Is privacy really that big of an issue? Netflix had insanely good revenue when they started out and there wasn’t much competition. The age-old saying is still true: “We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem”.
We again got to a point where you have to be subscribed to like 4 different providers, so torrenting is looking good again.
There will be people who will steal this and that, always have, always will. A tiny percent of this is just cheap, the rest is likely from poorer countries, and the (mind you, completely made up) value of these goods weren’t made for them - sure that $2 app really is cheap for you, but that is not globally true. (And it’s not like downloading that file cost anything to anyone). How do you fight against that? By making a good service and you make up a reasonable price.
> Netflix had insanely good revenue when they started out and there wasn’t much competition.
I'm really curious about when you think this was, and what you mean. They started out shipping DVDs at a loss and took a very long time to become profitable--or to start the streaming service we know today.
No, the stuff you make should also be free. Yet somehow, you should be paid a lot of money for it anyway. Probably from investors channeling Saudi oil money.
Yeah—being able to play pirated Gameboy games on my iPhone and turn my iPad Pro (or, even better, Apple TV) into the heart of a console emulation station is about the only thing that'd change about my use of iOS if sideloading were opened up to a free-for-all rather than the annoying time-limited thing they do now. Might also pirate discontinued iOS games. It'd 100% be piracy-related, for sure, all the non-piracy stuff I want to do, I already can.
Because it’s not hosting the apps directly - it’s a sideloaded app manager really - I could create my own repo and send the source to people and they could browse it and download an app from my repo via AltStore. I think there are only 2 native apps in AltStore available, one is an emulator and another is a clipboard manager.
Banned by who? The app is sideloaded, it isn’t on the App Store.
(“Sideloaded” here meaning from Apple/your phone’s point of view you developed the app and are just testing it, which is a fairly essential feature)
Theoretically, Apple has the ability to blacklist and purge apps installed on your device. This can be useful when they encounter new malware on their App Store, for example.
In practice, this would cost them billions if they don't do it very very quickly. The grace period for the European DMA will be ending in three to four months and this is exactly the type of anti-competitive behaviour the law was designed to ban.
It shouldn't take them that long to detect the API access this tool uses to generate free developer certificates if they really cared.
That may start an arms race that'll inevitably be too costly for Apple to continue, but after the initial blow I expect many people to drop the platform all together, giving Apple a one-time quick win.
It doesn’t create a free dev certificate, it uses the same tools as anyone downloading XCode, writing a program and installing on their phone would, it is a completely Apple-certified workflow automated to do the resigning every week.
I know it's certified and automated, but that doesn't stop Apple from detecting and blocking it somehow. There is a certificate process that's crucial to install the app onto the device and that gives Apple the control it may need to make the apps un-installable for at least a little while.
This Altstore seems to be backed by some kind of a LLC company. It begs the question - why would I as a developer, substitute one corporation with another? The whole point of having an alternative to the App Store is to reduce the risk of sudden policy changes coming from a for profit company controlling the store.
I think the logic is supposedly having multiple for-profits reduces the ability for any one to control the store, or at least incentivizes other stores to apply as little control as possible to gain users.
I think that works as global economic policy, but based off Android doesn’t really work in an app store case. In practice Altstore is mostly used for piracy…
and if the developer hadn't made an LLC "why would I put money or time into something not made by a company, that will just be completely gone as soon as the dev loses interest in the project"
My point was that setting up a presence in an "app store" requires some legal due diligence, so there has to be more on the table.
Just one example - they ask for actual Apple ID credentials and don't even have a Privacy Policy. Are they a processor or a controller? Where do I download the GDPR contract between my company and theirs? Who is their Data Protection Officer?
One can't just hand over control of an app to some random person with an LLC that offers to access your account and host binaries for you... but hey, pinky-promise they won't do bad stuff.
Altstore is so inconvenient. It generally can't refresh and I have to open mail apps regularly. Also, I have to refresh app every 7 days. I don't understand why it can't automate itself.
Also, why don't mozilla release altstore version of firefox that supports ublock. That would be so useful.
I agree it's inconvenient, but it's limited by Apple's choices. The only alternative really is to go to Android which doesn't have this kind of nonsense.
I've already done this for my tablet - sold my iPad Pro and bought a Samsung Tab. Being able to run whatever I want on it makes it actually feel like a personal computing device. iPad is so crippled by iOS/app store limitations it makes the device next to useless for me.
That’s a weird question, I’m not sure what you mean by safe. The source [1] was the 3rd result on Google. You could build it yourself. The author puts their real name and face on the project.
Why put all this effort into something that will be banned by Apple the second it gets popular? They have made it clear plenty of times in the past that personal developer certificates aren't a way to get around app store distribution.
This doesn’t use enterprise certificate; it creates a 7-day free developer certificate for each Apple ID, and uses it instead. That’s why there’s a server component in here.
Any user is allowed to use a free developer account, and that account can be used to execute code on your own device. The limitation is that you have to update your apps once a week to keep those apps authorized.
Altstore automates that renewal process, so in effect all you have to do is have you device connect to the same WiFi network as your Mac or Windows PC once a week.
This kind of nonsense is a great ad for Apple's hardware.
The extremely very obvious solution for people who want to install whatever they want is to get an android device, and yet people bend over backwards to try to get stuff onto Apple hardware. It's like buying a shirt that famously only comes in blue and trying to figure out how to make it be red.
If anything, this is a good reason for why external regulation is needed — there is no solution to this problem within capitalism, you simply can’t buy as good hardware as apple makes with Android, so this is what you are left with.
Reading this entire thread makes me wonder why in the world wouldn't people use Android. From Aurora Store, as the safest method, which by-passes Google play locality restrictions, through the likes of F-Droid, all the way to dedicated apk files or site-repositories of such, of course with all verifications carried out, for safety/security reasons, there is an incredible wealth of resources. And I'm not even considering rooting, and/or alternative OS images, to the vendor provided ones.
Following up on this, I realized I may have been harsh on the Apple phone supporters (I've been owning macbookpros since they first put a BSD flavor on these devices, so I am not an Apple "hater"), but - for me - having not paid for an app in ages (lots of iOS apps cost, when on Android are free), getting country local stores (for discounts), transportation, info/access and social contact media apps, throughout the world, via third party store (Apple won't allow my wife's phone to do such, as it is "stuck" on the US locale), network and security specialized apps allowing installs via apk files (not avail in Google or Apple stores), etc., etc. are now critical facilities for me.
Not everyone wants to use Android. I for one find it a buggy inconsistent mess of an OS and have no desire to have to screw around to make my phone work well. Not to mention the Google Play app store sucks hard. So much complete junk somehow promoted up to the top of the store.
Having to mess around with switching versions of Android to get one that doesn't suck isn't something most people want to waste their time on.
Also - performance. It's not even close to a debate that iOS has vastly superioir performance to Android IMO.
Why not jailbreak? I want to remain on the latest iOS software, and generally speaking, hardware. Jailbreaking is just not an option for me if I want to stay up to date and I don't want to deal with tethered jailbreaks, which seem to be more common for the latest release versions.