AltStore State of the Union

Riley Testut, co-founder of AltStore:

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.

Apple’s cowardly abandonment of ICEBlock in the face of the first whiff of pressure from the Trump administration is perhaps the best evidence yet that Apple’s arguments in favor of their App Store being the single source for third-party software do not hold water. I’m not going to argue that ICEBlock is an essential app, or super duper popular, but it is a very serious app that aims to address a very serious situation. In Apple’s email to developer Joshua Aaron informing him of their decision to pull ICEBlock from the App Store, they justified the decision on the spurious basis that the app contained “objectionable content”. The only content ICEBlock contains is the location of law enforcement activity. Waze — and more notably, Apple’s own Maps app — do the exact same thing for highway speed traps.

Apple’s decision shows that developers cannot trust the App Store to distribute apps that anyone in the Trump administration might “object to”. ICEBlock is an iOS exclusive app and service for serious privacy reasons that are grounded in technical merit. But, exactly as many critics of the App-Store-as-exclusive-distribution-point-for-native-software model have long warned, it’s proven to be a choke point that Apple was unwilling to defend. Apple frequently invokes the word trust as a reason for the App Store model. But their treatment of ICEBlock indicates they are untrustworthy when it comes to showing any sort of backbone regarding Trump’s mad-king slide into authoritarianism, and thus, so too is the entire iOS platform in jurisdictions like the US, where the App Store remains the exclusive distribution source. What good is building the most privacy-focused, user-friendly platform in the world when Apple will disallow an app for which airtight privacy is essential? What happens when Trump lickspittles go after women’s healthcare apps like Planned Parenthood?

If there were a way to distribute apps outside the App Store in the US (TestFlight doesn’t count, as it has hard limits on how many users can get the app — and it’s not clear that Apple hasn’t blocked ICEBlock from TestFlight too), US iPhone users would still have access to ICEBlock. If that were the case, perhaps the Trump administration would then “demand” that Apple revoke Aaron’s developer account. But if that happened, at least we’d know just how pants-wettingly terrified Apple is of the president, in our purported liberal democracy.

There’s lots of other interesting news in Testut’s AltStore status report, including the news that they’re adding Fediverse support to AltStore to distribute app updates and news (and more); converting to a public benefit corporation; have raised $6 million in funding; and are donating $500,000 of that money to help fund indie iOS Fediverse apps like Tapbots’s Ivory (Mastodon) and Phoenix (Bluesky) clients and The Iconfactory’s Tapestry feed aggregator.

★ Tuesday, 7 October 2025