This is Europe’s first alternative App Store for Apple.

Almost a month after Apple’s reluctant surrender to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), only one third-party app store for iOS is active in Europe.

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This is the B2B marketplace Mobivention, which allows companies to distribute their own applications internally. Although that’s great, things are not going to stay like this for long, as there are several projects about to be released.

The Epic Games Store and MacPaw’s Setapp have been announced, but it is AltStore that will probably arrive first on EU users’ phones. This new app marketplace from developer Riley Testut is a version of AltStore, an alternative to the App Store that was launched in 2019 and does not require users to jailbreak their devices.

What do we have in store to release on Apple this year?

The main driving force behind its creation was Delta, a Nintendo emulator that Testut and his partner Shane Gill are now bringing to the iPhone through their European app marketplace.

Currently, the new version of AltStore is in the approval process by Apple and will be ready to hit the market as soon as it receives the company’s approval. Fortunately, we have already had the opportunity to see a preview of the market and spend some time testing it.

One of the reasons why more app stores have not been launched at this time is partly because Apple makes them too expensive. For example, their Core Technology Fee (CTF) requires developers to pay Apple 50 euro cents for each annual installation of more than one million apps, but developers of third-party app stores must pay the CTF for each first annual installation of their app market.

In other words, each download of AltStore and Mobivention costs their developers 50 euro cents, a fee that could quickly become unsustainable. For example, the current AltStore has been downloaded over a million times.

There is no best practices guide to manage this, but Mobivention has passed on the CTF fees to its customers through affiliate packages. AltStore has not announced how it plans to handle this situation.

These fees are not devastating for users, but they can be a sufficient obstacle for curious people to not explore alternative app stores, especially if they are not sure what they will find. After all, no one likes to pay for services they may not use.

Install an app store

Another possible obstacle to the widespread adoption of third-party marketplaces is their complexity, as each store requires a dozen on-screen interactions to install.

The process is as follows: you start by clicking on a browser link to load the alternative store. Then, a pop-up window appears informing you that your installation settings do not allow markets from that developer.

Then you have to go to Settings, enable the market, go back to the browser, click again on the download link and receive another message asking you to confirm the installation. Finally, you can open the store and browse through the available applications.

It’s not a complicated procedure, but there are enough steps and scary language to make it annoying and discouraging, especially when Apple’s App Store only requires one click to start.

It’s hard to see this as anything other than the company’s attempt to undermine people’s energy and discourage them from moving forward, especially considering Apple’s historical prowess in designing user experiences.

Fortunately, installing third-party applications is easier. Both in Mobivention and AltStore, the process is the same as in the App Store: you click on a button that says “install” and… it installs. At least at first glance.

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Although this method works for the apps included in AltStore (Delta and Clip), using software from other providers requires a slightly different approach. AltStore allows you to add “sources”, which are URLs that developers share and contain JSON files with app metadata. Once these sources are added, the apps they point to can be downloaded from AltStore. It’s kind of like the movie Inception: stores within a store.

Obviously, this decentralized approach differs from Apple’s App Store, which includes everything, and could further discourage the general public. It’s a bit complicated for most people. That being said, I bet many enthusiasts are rubbing their hands with joy over this unrestricted approach to app distribution.

These fonts will not be available at the time of launch, but Testut states that it is a “priority after launch” and that soon there will be a list of recommended fonts from which to download applications.

When will we get used to it?

Of course, for the public to get used to alternative markets, consumer-oriented ones must be launched first. Although AltStore is about to be launched, the approval process has been slow and prolonged, which has prevented the launch from taking place in March.

Fundamentally, in its current state, third-party app stores for iOS like AltStore will only be attractive to advanced users, groups of enthusiasts who are desperate to solve niche problems or have a particular interest in something they can’t get on the App Store, like a clipboard manager or a fully functional game emulator.

iOS 17 DOWNLOAD

And Apple? They’re probably quite happy with this. The less things mess with their big source of income, the better, even though their approach to complying with the DMA makes them ripe fruit for the hungry EU regulators.