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Comment by jocoda | Hacker News Reader

I have no interest in distributing IOS apps but I would like to be able to install and run my own code on IOS.

Right now I can install my own code on my iPhone but if I don't have a Apple developer account Apple will remove apps after a week. And presumably when the account lapses, so does the install.

How, if at all, are these Apple restrictions affected? Are we still stuck in the thrall of Apple or do we get more options?

Maybe one day that could make it possible to install projects directly from github.

I suspect that there are thousands of interesting projects on the Apple Store that you can't find unless you know exactly what they are called because for obvious reasons the App Store search is a POS. Github would be a much more useful source of the apps that Apple doesn't profit from.

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The one week limitation is so mind bogglingly stupid, it’s something only Apple could come up with.

Hostile, not stupid.

Hostile is stupid, because Apple's brand is something along the lines of "make things straightforward and high quality for the end user". If they can't justify a short duration like a week they are betraying that brand.

This brand supports them doing all sorts of things that some like and some chafe at. For example, the ios store, grossly deficient as it is, is IMHO a relative win: combined with the strict hardware lockdown it makes me comfortable casually downloading apps, and more importantly my parents downloading apps. Other examples are the automatic backups to the cloud or the Safari requirement. I look at my dad's virus- and crapware-ridden windows machine and just shake my head. It's gotten so terrible that he uses his phone more and more because it keeps working.

Apple understands the subtlety of that brand too well, and they get away with a lot (e.g. they crushed a lot of opportunities for advertising spyware -- yay! -- but kept that capability for themselves).

BTW I wouldn't and don't tolerate that automatic backup in macos nor a strict app store lockdown, and if the mac really headed in that direction I'd go back to Linux. For example, Dropbox is a first class citizen on the mac, but not quite on ios.

I understand that some chafe under the ios restrictions, and I don't blame them. I still think of my laptop as my "real" personal computing device and my phone as something I want to always be working.

AltServer from the AltStore folks allows you to automate the renewal of sideloaded apps. It’s not perfect, but it’s an excellent workaround.

http://altstore.io/

An app called "reprovision" can do the same on an iOS device, without requiring a copy of altserver running. I haven't used it since 2021 when I used it for signing a jailbreak app, and development has stalled since then, but it worked for me.

You can also use SideStore which can do the same without a server.

> How, if at all, are these Apple restrictions affected?

They are completely unaffected by the DMA. The only exception might be if another store decides to allow sharing of signing keys across apps they host, however one bad actor could take down the entire set of keys used if flagged.

It's even worse, even with an Apple Developer account you still need to beg them for certain entitlements. No entitlements means no VPNs, no invisible push notifications etc.

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