No, it won't. Keep in mind that we didn't have the 7 day side-load for free apple ids prior to 2015[1]. All apple has to do is disable sideloading for free accounts. I imagine it won't impact many legitimate developers, who probably have paid developer accounts anyways.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2015/06/10/xcode-7-allows-anyone-to-down...
Also I didn’t check out how this store works but if you have to reinstall every few weeks I imagine it gets tedious pretty quickly.
“While there’s nothing I could do about this from the iOS device itself, as it turns out the same underlying iTunes (WiFi) sync infrastructure I’m using allows you to also install and remove provisioning profiles from devices (since Xcode also requires this ability to manage profiles for developers). Before installing an app, I remove all the existing profiles on the device to make it look to the system like there are no other apps installed, and then once the app is installed I reinstall all the profiles. It’s very simple, but it works.”
http://rileytestut.com/blog/2019/09/25/introducing-altstore/
> Also, iOS only looks for an excessive number of app provisioning profiles, not the number of apps you have installed
Edit: I do really like this though, it is a clever way out of the walled garden! I’ve used TestFlight to load stuff like ish on my phone, and would consider doing this if apple doesn’t go around murdering apple ids associated with it.
In fact arguably they should implement signed reciepts so they don't have to track which apps you own. As it is they know all the apps you own, and probably even when and how often you run them.
Instead they could send you a cryptographically signed receipt and then not actually keep track of which apps you own. When you want an update they verify the receipt. That would be more privacy oriented than what they have now.
How?
I've seen him working on this project (Delta and the AltStore) for four or five years. It's a project he's passionate about, and he's building it for himself, not to try and make money. (In fact, he's turned down offers from startups and top tech companies to work on this). More than almost anyone else I know, Riley embodies the classical hacker ethos. I believe partway through the project he decided to make this open source, so he then went back and re-factored a lot of the code to make it easier to learn from.
Here's the repository, btw: https://github.com/rileytestut/AltStore
I think apple release free signing without Apple Developer Account in July 2016.
I’ve been able to install the AltStore app to my phone but nothing else, it can’t find the server even though we’re on the same network.
The smartphone ecosystem is very healthy, there are plenty of opportunities for everyone to get exactly what they want.
> For this distribution method, AltStore requires your Apple ID and password to communicate on your behalf with Apple’s developer servers.
This seems really sketchy, and I would not be surprised if Apple took steps to prevent this, and possibly even to disable Apple IDs associated with this activity.
> The last major restriction is that an iOS device may only ever have at most 3 apps installed using this method, even if they come from different Apple IDs. This was by far the most frustrating one to deal with, but thankfully I was able to find a workaround in time.
The workaround (swapping around provisioning profiles) sounds like it's abusing a bug which Apple could fix pretty easily.
[1]: http://rileytestut.com/blog/2019/09/25/introducing-altstore/
Alternative app stores will likely come to ios in one form or another. I think the smarter reaction would be for apple to offer an official API so that it can remain somewhat in control.
Well, there's an underestimation of Apple if ever I saw it.
Please someone correct me if I'm wrong because I really want this kind of thing to work.
The big catch is, users need to resign every seven days...
This is the AltStore's main link: https://altstore.io
This is the author's launch blogpost: http://rileytestut.com/blog/2019/09/25/introducing-altstore/
And this is the Github repo: https://github.com/rileytestut/AltStore
Their best chance of survival, IMO, is building a developer collaboration platform that Apple finds worthy of purchase and maybe will integrate into XCode - something along the lines of Github but exclusive to the Apple platform with lots of integrations they can rely on for workflows and such. I think I’ve read that Apple isn’t big on services, but if this were developed in a peer-to-peer sort of way, piggybacking on iCloud as much as possible, maybe they’d want it.
Nor do I expect they would or should try to "let this slide" due to the fear of antitrust investigation. Hacker News loves to deploy the walled ecosystem FUD, but given the iOS security model has proven itself technically absent any consideration of trustbusting, I expect them to stand on their convictions and fight the antitrust battle head on, not death by a 1000 pinpricks.
Encourage folks to learn more technically and use the developer tooling as is, then you can sideload whatever you want!!! Beyond that, it's not that hard: Don't abuse developer-facing tooling & workflows to allow consumers to do stupid things.
Seems like a very nice job and will likely make Impactor and signing services like Tuta or AppValley obsolete.
Remember when you took out SuperBowl ads [1] demonizing authoritarian, totalitarian megacorps that told you how to think and what to do - YOU are that company in 2019.
Maybe if you let this alt store be, and monitor it's metrics you'll see that your users really want cheaper, more-full featured apps that you'd never allow on the app store - like a competing browser engine (Chromium), or JIT enabled javascript core [2], ...
It may also happen that this alt-store becomes a piracy and malware haven - in which case, your thesis of totalitarian moderation might win. I'd bet my money on the former - a thriving alt-store filled with apps Apple is too cowardly to approve on it's main store - like Steam Game Streaming, Chromium Browser, JIT enabled js/node, ...
