Apple and sideloading

2025-08-08

For Android, sideloading is very easy, just go ahead and enable the “allow app to install apps” setting, and then you download the APK file and get to installing. It is a very easy process, and doesn’t require too much bullshit to pull it off. However, on iOS, sideloading anything is a painful experience, and I think that Apple does this intentionally to make the user reconsider using something outside the App Store.

So you get something like AltStore, you install the server side of the app on your PC, once installed you need to have iTunes installed as well (for driver support I’d imagine), once done it is time to connect your device up to the computer, and to get AltStore installed, the program asks you for your Apple ID and password, I don’t know why (presumably to register yourself as a “dev” to Apple), and once that is done, AltStore should (?) be ready. But wait, there is more! You now need to authorize developer apps, which is in a menu that is hidden and hard to find. So AltStore is ready, right? Nope. The moment you need to install something, the app will demand your Apple ID credentials again. So you put these in, and now, finally, your app should be installed.

This fucking sucks. Apps are not persistent at all (as they expire only after a week, unless you keep your device connected to the same network as the computer AltStore is running on), and often sideloaded apps end up expiring in a week because the connection to the computer fails somewhere along the line. And you can’t just refresh the app and get it working again, no no, you need to uninstall, reinstall the app, and resign in or do whatever it is you need to do to get it working. You also get 10 app slots to install on your device, and some apps take up multiple spots to make things worse. You can forget about notifications, because apparently that is not a free feature (because of course it fucking isn’t). Did I mention that apps only last a week until they expire? If you let it expire, iOS will tell you that “Appname is no longer available”. Fucking hell.

The thing that truly angers me about this is how persistently Apple has denied the right for the consumer to run any app they desire from outside the App Store. They lie saying that “sideloading is dangerous”, implying that the user is so fucking stupid that they by themselves cannot figure out if the app they are installing is malicious or not. I paid for the hardware, I should have the ability to do whatever the fuck I want on my device, and no fucking rotten corporation should have any say the moment the device is outside the store and on the hands of the consumer.