Evolving AltStore PAL
- 11 minsIn April of last year, we launched AltStore PAL in the European Union as one of the first official alternative app marketplaces on iOS thanks to the Digital Markets Act. We launched with just 2 apps — my Nintendo emulator Delta and clipboard manager Clip — yet Apple immediately changed their App Store rules to allow emulators worldwide for the first time ever.
Competition, imagine that!
Since then, my co-founder Shane Gill and I have continued to evolve AltStore PAL and open up the iOS app ecosystem to entirely new kinds of apps. In just our first year:
- We launched 3rd-party apps in AltStore PAL in July 2024, including the first iOS torrenting apps and the virtual machine app UTM. In response, Apple changed their App Store rules to allow virtual machines — the second time they’ve changed their rules in response to competition from AltStore — allowing everyone worldwide to run Windows on their iPad.
- In August 2024, we partnered with Epic Games to bring Fortnite and their other mobile games to AltStore PAL. As part of this partnership, Epic also agreed to cover the €0.50 “Core Technology Fee” Apple charges us for each download of AltStore PAL, allowing us to make AltStore entirely free to use.
- Earlier this year, we published Hot Tub, the first pornography app available on iOS. Despite being easily accessible in Safari, porn is something Apple wants you to believe is incredibly dangerous — unless of course you’re Elon Musk, in which case it’s totally fine that your AI app can generate nude deepfakes of Taylor Swift despite being rated 13+.
- Finally, in April we announced our self-publishing process. This allowed developers to publish their apps for free on AltStore PAL without any involvement from us. Thanks to this, we now have over 100 self-published apps in AltStore — and we’re just getting started.
To sum up, it’s been a wild year! Now that we’ve had some time to catch our breath however, I’m excited to share some big announcements regarding our plans for the next year — including some additional funding we’ve received to accomplish these goals and keep growing AltStore sustainably.
So without further adieu…
A Global App Store
By far our number one request, we’re planning to launch AltStore PAL in more countries later this year in response to various regulatory changes around the world. Specifically, we plan to launch in Japan, Brazil, and Australia before the end of the year, with the UK to follow in 2026. This is great news for the fight to open app distribution, as it will give consumers more options to install apps they otherwise couldn’t from the App Store — such as my clipboard manager Clip.
While we wait to hear more from Apple on exact timing, if you’re a developer interested in distributing your app through AltStore PAL in one of these countries feel free to check out our documentation now to get a head start. Overall though, we couldn’t be more excited to make AltStore PAL available to millions of more people; we truly believe it’s a matter of time before alternative app marketplaces are available worldwide, and each new country brings us one step closer to that goal.
A Federated App Store
A few years ago, Shane and I joined Mastodon along with many others in the Apple community who wanted a break from Twitter. For those that don’t know, Mastodon is part of the open social web (also known as the “Fediverse”); a collection of independent, decentralized social networks that can interoperate with each other. Other popular examples include Threads and Bluesky. However, the underlying protocols that enable this interoperability — ActivityPub and AT Proto, for the nerds — support far more than just social media posts; they can support virtually any form of media.
So what about apps?
I’m sure you see where this is going. Today, I’m thrilled to announce AltStore is officially joining the Fediverse 🥳
Using ActivityPub, we plan to federate apps, app updates, and news alerts from AltStore to the open social web. Each AltStore source will receive its own ActivityPub account, which can then be followed by any other open social web account. You’ll be able to like, boost, and reply to everything, and most importantly all these interactions will appear natively in AltStore. In other words, you’ll be able to comment on an app on Mastodon, like a news update on Threads, then open AltStore and view all these same interactions in-app. Even better, if you login with your open social web account you can comment, like, and boost right from within AltStore!
Behind the scenes, we’ve partnered with Mastodon gGmbH to manage a custom Mastodon server on our behalf, and also with A New Social to natively support Bluesky via Bridgy Fed. Initially we’ll be shoe-horning all apps/updates/news alerts into toots (i.e. ActivityPub’s “Note”) for maximum compatibility, but long-term we plan to publish hypothetical new “SoftwareRelease” ActivityPub objects which could then be understood natively by other Fediverse clients — including other app marketplaces!
We plan to add these features to AltStore PAL in the next few months — but to celebrate our first appearance at FediForum we’re making our Mastodon server available TODAY in beta at explore.alt.store 🎉 We’ve included a few popular sources from the community to start; you can view a complete up-to-date list of all federated AltStore sources here. And if you’re a developer and want to know how to start federating your own AltStore PAL source, check out our FAQ.
As we iron out the kinks we’d love your feedback on how we can make the experience as nice as possible, so please send your feedback to us on Mastodon, Threads, or Bluesky 🙂
An update to AltStore PAL with native Fediverse integration is coming soon.
An Enduring App Store
By partnering with Mastodon and A New Social directly, we’re able to offload much of the added complexity of connecting AltStore to the Fediverse and focus on what we know best: building great apps. This is critical because as just a 2-person team, my co-founder Shane and I need to be careful about managing our time and not over-exerting ourselves.
For context, Shane and I have been working on AltStore full-time for over 5 years now funded entirely by donations to our Patreon. This has worked better than I ever could have imagined, and I’m so incredibly thankful for our patrons. However, the reality is Shane and I are starting to reach the limits of what we can realistically accomplish as just 2 people without burning ourselves out — and that’s before connecting AltStore PAL to the Fediverse or expanding to new countries. As amazing as it’s been to have a sustainable Patreon, we simply can’t afford to hire a 3rd person, let alone a full team.
Enter Chris Paik.
We first met Chris a few years ago after he sideloaded Paperback — an excellent manga reader — with AltStore Classic. He was incredibly excited by what we were building and wanted to offer us whatever help he could. It turns out he was an early investor in Patreon and Twitch — and current member of Patreon’s board — so he had plenty of experience with creator-focused projects. Since then we’ve kept in touch and asked him for advice on several occasions; the more we talked with him, the more clear it became how aligned we all were regarding what AltStore could be.
Fast forward to earlier this year, when I came across an excellent blog post by Ben Werdmuller titled “Let’s fund the open social web.” In it, Ben makes a strong case for the need to start thinking seriously about building sustainable businesses if we want the open social web to succeed, and how that requires funding. He then goes on to describe the many ways of funding projects, with the bootstrapping section hitting especially close to home:
Bootstrapping is financially conservative, but emotionally intense. You carry all the risk, and early mistakes can cost you months — or everything. Without funding, you may struggle to hire help, pay yourself, or scale infrastructure. And while you own 100% of the business, you also carry 100% of the stress.
This is exactly the situation we found ourselves in with AltStore. We were putting everything we could into the company, but fundamentally we weren’t able to hire more help or scale our operations beyond the essentials and that was severely limiting us. As long as we were reliant on Patreon donations we’d be facing these constraints, and we realized that needed to change if we wanted to ensure AltStore can survive long-term and actively compete with emerging app stores as alternative marketplaces spread worldwide.
So after considering all our options, we decided to reach out to Chris. He had recently started his own investment firm Pace Capital, so we pitched him our plan to join the Fediverse and expand into new countries. We asked if he’d be willing to invest in us so we could make it a reality — and he was fully on board.
tl;dr:
- Pace Capital is investing $6 million USD in AltStore in exchange for 15% equity. We will use this money to hire a few employees and build out a team, giving us the necessary bandwidth to finalize Fediverse integration and expand AltStore worldwide, while also releasing betas and app updates on a more regular basis.
- We’re transitioning from an LLC to a public benefit corporation (PBC). This ensures our incentives are always aligned with our core mission: empowering developers to freely distribute their apps on the open web.
- Flipboard CEO Mike McCue will be joining our newly formed Board of Directors in addition to Chris, Shane, and myself to help guide us on our approach to embracing the open social web. Flipboard and his new app Surf are right at the forefront of the open social web movement, so I couldn’t be happier to have someone with Mike’s experience to help us build the world’s first federated app store!
With a full team and Chris and Mike on board, I’m confident we’ll have the guidance and bandwidth we need to evolve AltStore into an enduring, global, federated app store. That being said, I want to make it clear that this does not include Delta (or Clip). Delta remains entirely owned by me, and we’ll continue to work on it full-time as one of AltStore’s flagship apps. It does however mean Delta will receive updates more frequently going forward as we expand the team, especially as we work towards releasing Delta 2.0 later this year.
While this helps solve our problems, it’s clear we’re far from the only open social web project that could use some funding. A rising tide lifts all boats, and because we believe the success of AltStore is intimately tied with the success of the open social web we wanted to do what we could to help ensure its long-term success.
So to give back to the open social web, we’re also donating a total of $500,000 to various Fediverse-related projects. This includes $300,000 to Mastodon gGmbH to thank them for their incredible stewardship of the entire ecosystem, with the remainder being split between the following incredible projects. The Fediverse as we know it today would not exist without them, so I recommend checking them all out!
Bridgy Fed by A New Social
Ivory + Phoenix by Tapbots
Tapestry by the Iconfactory
mstdn.social
Akkoma
PeerTube
Bookwyrm
Fedify
Between expanding to more countries and adding deep Fediverse integration, the next year will be an incredibly exciting time for AltStore. In just one year AltStore PAL has already pressured Apple to make several positive changes to the iOS app ecosystem, and we plan to continue doing everything we can to make the platform better for consumers and developers alike.
Alternative app marketplaces are needed more than ever now, with new reasons for them popping up every week. If there’s one constant though, it’s that Apple simply cannot be trusted to be the sole distributor of apps on the iOS platform. Thanks to the DMA Apple’s tight grip over developers has finally been loosened, and as more countries pass their own laws allowing alternative app marketplaces we’ll continue to expand AltStore PAL and do our best to open up the iOS app ecosystem as much as possible — while federating everything as we go!
Riley Testut
Independent iOS developer, USC student, and Apple fan.