Hacker News Reader

Comment by procinct | Hacker News Reader

I believe you only have to pay to put your app on the App Store. I’ve made apps for my iPhone before and never had to pay.

View on HN

It's the "for longer than a week" bit - Unless you have a paid developer account, you can only sign apps to sideload that last one week.

There's some tools to automate "refreshing" the app, but that requires you have some other computer that pushes a new app every week.

The "1 week" restriction is usually fine when you're developing (as you typically are continually rebuilding and updating when actively working on an app) but is clearly intended to avoid being a way to sideload apps without the developer account "nearby".

If you trust it, SideStore manages to do it on device by using a local VPN to make an on-device server appear to be an external device on the network.

is there a reason to be wary of sidestore? first time i've heard of that but seems like a legit opensource project. doesn't seem like it would be a project that is all that lucrative for bad actors... people that don't want to pay $99/year to load apps on their personal iphones/ipads doesn't seem like a big score.

I believe they had an issue early on where some Apple IDs were getting soft-locked but said issue has been resolved for a few years now and it's easy to make an Apple ID specifically to use with SideStore.

[1]: https://docs.sidestore.io/docs/faq/#why-is-my-account-gettin...

I’m not a 100% on this, but I believe you need to pay them to “sign” your app. For iOS, that means there is no way anyone else will be able to use your app unless they side-load it themselves (and we all know how cumbersome that is, Apple doesn’t want to make it easy).

correct

Reply on news.ycombinator.com