Between expanding worldwide and adding Fediverse integration, the next year will be an incredibly exciting time for AltStore! Alternative app marketplaces are needed more than ever now, and we’ll continue to do our best to open up the iOS app ecosystem as much as possible.
Yes it’s true, AltStore is joining the Fediverse 🥳
Developers can now federate apps, updates, and news alerts to the open social web via our custom Mastodon server, and all likes, boosts, and comments will appear natively in AltStore.
We plan to release this officially soon — but you can check out a beta version TODAY at https://explore.alt.store and start following accounts like @utm!
So in order to grow the team, I’m thrilled to announce AltStore has received an investment of $6 million USD from @cpaik! Chris was an early investor in Patreon & Twitch, and we’ve been close ever since he sideloaded the manga reader Paperback with AltStore years ago
Additionally, Flipboard CEO @mike will also be joining our Board of Directors! Mike’s experience with Flipboard & @surf will be invaluable as we expand to the Fediverse, and I couldn’t be happier to have both him + Chris on board
To get this all done however, we realized we needed more help.
From the beginning it’s been just @shanegill.io and I working on everything thanks to donations to our Patreon, but the truth is we’re starting to reach the limit of what just 2 people can do — and that’s without joining the Fediverse or expanding to new countries.
While this solves our problems, we are far from the only Fediverse project that could use some funding and we want to support the growth of the entire ecosystem.
So to give back to the open social web, we’re also donating $500,000 total to these incredible Fediverse-related projects 🎉
I’ve never seen my timeline so negative during an #AppleEvent and honestly I’m so proud. Fuck Tim Cook for ruining what used to be such an exciting day for us Apple nerds
@nikitonsky it’s extremely hard to parse/understand at first glance (to me), so I end up never using it. Kinda like to the paradox of choice — it’s overwhelming when I just want to do something simple, so I don’t do anything at all
@gruber@Jann@caseyliss that is not how the law works John, you do not have a right to defy laws you disagree with — but you’re right that that is how people like Elon, Trump, and Tim Cook think the law works though
Apple’s told us many times their goal is for Notarization to take “a few hours” max, but so far every AltStore app submission (from both us and 3rd party devs) has taken multiple weeks 🙃 https://fosstodon.org/@altstore/112486085494364227
• Yes, it’s coming! • We’ve been working on it for a while and it’s near completion, just need to finish up controller skins + fix some last bugs • We didn’t prioritize iPad because plan was to launch in just EU with AltStore PAL (which doesn’t support iPad) • Obviously plans changed when Apple changed their rules, so we’re prioritizing iPad now and it will come with the next major Delta update (1.6) • It’s available now for Patrons through regular AltStore 🙂