Altstore: Home for apps that push the boundaries of iOS
altstore.io
altstore.io
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.
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.
Gets a bit convoluted as they have their own gmail accounts as well. But it works :-)
I still have my original Apple YouTube Red subscription active!
I don't know how much that effects recommendations, but Google support claims that's has an effect.
Might be easier than the alternatives listed by sibling comments.
I travel outside of where it's "supported", or trigger their broken algorithms, and boom, it stops working. Meanwhile, my adblock software works 24/7.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?hl=en#zipp...
Travel to any country where Premium isn't supported (about half the world's countries) and, bam, it shows ads again.
Normally I can understand content licensing agreements per country, but that doesn't apply to YouTube mostly. So it seems like a real BS move indeed.
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.
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.
I don't feel guilty about this because I only want YT-Premium for blocking the ads, I don't need the music, videos etc that comes with it.
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.
Why not use the "Watch later" feature to add it to your queue? I use that feature all the time.
> Nevermind
–Emily LaTella
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.
Even if you pay for youtube you get the sponsor spiels within the videos.
I wouldn't use youtube at all without sponsorblock.
Another option is to just VPN to Turkey when setting it up (Can be done with a UK account and UK card) and then it's about $1.5/month.
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.
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.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629
[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...
[3] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sponsorblock-for-youtube/id157...
Charging money for f/oss simply because sideloading isn't a thing is a scummy move.
While Ajay may have written sponsorblock, the database it uses is crowdsourced. Charging money for access feels wrong to me.
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.
VLC is in the app store (with telemetry, sadly) so I'm not sure where the whole "GPL isn't compatible with the app store" claim comes from.
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.
[0]: https://patreon.com/ajayyy
[1]: Or rather, most have been shamed into doing it and only pay the bigger projects. Anything smaller just falls to the wayside.
Oh really? I've never heard of it prior to this thread.
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.
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.
How though? I just spent the last hour trying to configure a source and it seems impossible to make it work.
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.
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.
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.
The EU seem to stopped fighting against misuse of power in IT. Only when a competitor has money fight?
On the other end we have this awful Cookie-Directive. A disaster and misuse is now on even worse.
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 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 GDPR was supposed to outlaw spyware. 5 years later, Google and Facebook are still in business.
If the enforcement of the DMA is like the GDPR's, you're gonna be waiting for a long time.
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.
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’m hopeful that Apple will allow sideloading apps directly in iOS 17 to comply with new EU regulations, but I guess we will see.
I’m worried about battery drain, lack of hardware keys (or the need to carry a gamepad) as well as being interrupted by notifications.
I’m likely spoiled by nintendo switch; and there are also dedicated console emulation devices, they seem interesting too.
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.
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.
JIT is not disabled on the hardware level, safari does use it for JS for example. Just ordinary AppStore apps can’t do so.
Also, in my experience with Delta playing some of the Pokemon games, I noticed no difference between the non-JIT and JIT-ted versions.
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.
iphones especially have good SoCs for emulation, but modern android is really good as well barring high level GPU driver bugs occasionally
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.
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.
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...
For example a PornHub viewer. Would never be allowed. Or a torrent manager.
Where else are you finding all these apps you seem to be alluding to?
As well as some apps that are just off limits for the App Store, like emulators.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AltStore/comments/p4ih1f/my_preferr...
I wonder if there's any chance of getting modern Linux on my M1 iPad at near-native speed.
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?
The ipad pro contains the same chip as the macbooks and comes with 8gb/16gb ram options. It's more powerful than the average Windows laptop.
I mean, what exactly is the value prop here?
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.
It's so anti-revolutionary that currently-sitting administrations in America and Europe agree that Apple is deserving of anticompetitive inquiry.
>Because according to the typical regulator it’s bad when others impose limits, but not when they impose limits.
I agree, regulators shouldn't exist.
>> 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.
That bootlicking for corporations never really did a thing for me personally — they are literally paper clip optimizers without a care for anyone.
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.
And any form of torrent client.
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.
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: Ah yes, the readme explains: https://github.com/altstoreio/AltStore#altstore
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.
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.
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.
Does it have a proper call recorder app?
Does it have something that lets me configure notifications and alert for different SIMs (for call alerts at least) differently?
Maybe let see and manage different SMS from different SIMs differently in a visually different way.
Etc.
But instead it seems to offer a game emulator as its USP. Which is useless for me as I have never played and do not want to play games on a phone.
So it depends what “boundaries” really does these apps or app-stores push.
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.
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).
I think this is changing, but native iOS versions of Chrome and Firefox have not been released yet.
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.
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.
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 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.
If one can truly do whatever they want on their computer, whenever, then I don't see any compelling reason to hide.
Is it because you have something to hide?
Most people have a sense of modesty…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Nintendo?
EDIT: Appears someone built a Linux version of the server component, https://github.com/NyaMisty/AltServer-Linux
Will have to give this a try!
How AltStore is building a haven for forbidden iPhone apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31323321 - May 2022 (1 comment)
AltServer 1.5 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31253588 - May 2022 (1 comment)
AltStore – An alternative app store for non-jailbroken iOS devices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568379 - June 2021 (215 comments)
AltStore: An alternative app store for non-jailbroken iOS devices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25028786 - Nov 2020 (173 comments)
AltStore is an iOS App Store alternative that doesn’t require a jailbreak - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21201810 - Oct 2019 (1 comment)
An iOS developer built an alternative App Store for the iPhone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21162548 - Oct 2019 (1 comment)
Altstore – An alternative iOS app store, no jailbreak required - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21088998 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)
AltStore: iOS App Store alternative that doesn’t require jailbreak - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21083828 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)
AltStore: Alternative iOS app store that doesn't require a jailbreak - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21083092 - Sept 2019 (47 comments)
AltStore is an alternative iOS App Store with a built-in Nintendo emulator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21081639 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)
A home for apps that push the boundaries of iOS. No jailbreak required - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21076155 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)
AltStore - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21075818 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)
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.
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.
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…
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.
Also, why don't mozilla release altstore version of firefox that supports ublock. That would be so useful.
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.
And how do we know?
It blocks all the ads
The homepage does not talk about what differs those apps from those in the App Store.
Does it let me install apps like apk's in android? That's it? The homepage DOES NOT tell me that, lmao.
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.
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.
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.
To each his own, I guess ...