Riley Testut has spent the better part of the last decade trying to
sneak in through the side door of the iPhone. Since he was a teenager,
the Dallas-Fort Worth native has been fascinated with app development —
in particular, with emulation technology that allows modern computing
devices to run the video game software of decades-old game consoles.
AltStore is a way to distribute iPhone apps that are not allowed on the official App Store
“As
a kid, I played all these games, and so I just came across some code
that I thought I could turn into an app to play Game Boy games, and that
just started a whole thing,” Testut says. “I just found myself in this
whole emulation scene. I probably don’t know if I would have picked it
really if I had thought through everything. Because it’s a lot to work
on these apps, knowing that they’re not going to be in the App Store
ever.”
His initial emulation work, spanning the last two years of high school, resulted in a Game Boy emulator
known as GBA4iOS. It made headlines in 2014 when both Apple and Nintendo
moved to shut his project down. (GBA4iOS
lived on for some time, thanks to a clever loophole, but it is no longer available.)
Now,
Testut, a 22-year-old freelance software developer living in Los
Angeles, may have figured out a way for his software to live on Apple’s
iOS platform for good. He calls it AltStore, and it’s an
alternative mobile app distribution platform that lets anyone download software that’s not available on the official App Store.
The
store’s very first app: Delta, a GBA4iOS successor Testut has been
building since well before he entered the University of Southern
California a half-decade ago. The really interesting part is that none
of it requires you to jailbreak your iPhone, so it’s available to anyone
who’s willing to download it, for free.
Delta is a powerful app
with the kind of polish you’d expect from a major software maker. It
lets anyone run corresponding game files for NES, SNES, Game Boy, Game
Boy Advance, and even Nintendo 64 consoles. Testut is also working on
Nintendo DS emulation and other related projects for future updates.
It’s the kind of app Apple would never allow, but it’s also the kind of
software iPhone users have been dreaming about for years.
“It’s
more fun working on it for iOS because, yeah, on Android, I could just
release a tiny [emulator]. But on iOS, I know that people want this. I
know people want to relive those games. I also know that so many people
have iPhones. I have an iPhone,” he says. “So I want to bring what I
know people want to everyone. That’s really the motivation here.”
For
Testut, AltStore arose from him just “wanting to get Delta out” and in
the hands of people who’d want to try it. “It just made sense. If I’m
building this whole process for Delta, just to build it out for anyone
to use,” he says. “I’m also hoping that because I was so motivated to do
this, and I build this whole process, other people can now start making
more apps to bring to it. I’m doing it because I want to also improve
the quality of apps that you won’t find in the App Store, but that could
still exist on the platform.”
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| © Photo by Alix Diaconis / The Verge |
AltStore works, thanks to a clever combination of tricks that exploit
how the iPhone is designed to be used by independent developers. It
involves downloading a companion application called AltServer, which
then takes your Apple ID and installs AltStore onto your iPhone, signing
it as an app you’ve created yourself. But in reality, it’s Testut’s
software. The same trick underpins software like
Cydia Impactor, a popular tool for sideloading apps on iOS that arose in the years after jailbreaking fell out of fashion.
“AltStore
basically lets you install apps outside the App Store by tricking the
phone into thinking you developed the app yourself, like you programmed
it and you installed it and you’re testing out your device,” he says. “A
few years ago, Apple added the ability for Xcode, Apple’s developer
tool, to allow anyone with an Apple ID to install their own apps on
their phones, so that Apple could encourage people to learn to program
iPhone apps and test them out.” Testut says AltServer is using the same
process behind the scenes to get AltStore onto your phone.
There
are some restrictions involved, like having to plug your phone in
initially to install AltServer and having to refresh AltStore every
seven days to sidestep an Apple restriction on self-installed apps. But
Testut conceived a way to have your phone complete that refresh process
over the internet using iTunes Wi-Fi sync. He launched AltStore last
weekend after testing it extensively for months earlier this year, and
the response he says has been astounding. He says he also hasn’t “heard
anything from Apple or Nintendo, so taking that as a good sign for now.”
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| © Photo by Alix Diaconis / The Verge |
Those privy to the niche mobile emulation and iOS jailbreaking scene
likely know Testut’s name. As the creator of GBA4iOS, Testut became a
popular figure in emulation before he’d ever taken a college-level
programming course, and it grew even more when he was able to sneak the
software onto any iPhone, thanks to a clever workaround involving what’s
known as the Apple Developer Enterprise Program.
The enterprise
program is a software platform Apple designed to let large corporations
distribute private apps, be it for testing or for internal company
operations. But Testut suspected Apple wasn’t keeping a close eye on who
applied for the $300-a-year license to access the platform or what they
were doing with it. So he found a company that sold the certificates
(Apple parlance for the license to distribute private iOS software) and
used that certificate to start distributing GBA4iOS to anyone who chose
to download it from his website.
Of course, Apple caught on quick and revoked Testut’s certificate. Nintendo also
targeted Testut’s GitHub account with a takedown notice for hosting the emulation code. While the legality of ripped game files, known as ROMs, is pretty clear-cut, the
legality of emulator software is less so; it’s never been decided in court. But Testut wasn’t looking for a legal fight, and he yanked his code voluntarily.
He
then embarked on a years-long project to turn GBA4iOS into something
more powerful that he later called Delta. He began working on Delta in
between freelance software gigs and a slate of classes at USC. Roughly a
year ago,
he announced that he would be shifting his attention to it full time after graduating.
Testut made headlines in 2014 when both Apple and Nintendo tried to shut down his emulator
In the years since GBA4iOS, the enterprise program has become the
platform of choice for far more questionable and outright illegal software,
from entire illicit app stores peddling cracked versions of popular
subscription software like Netflix and Spotify Premium to knock-off
video games, pornography apps, and torrent clients. Many of them are
based in China and seem to have an endless supply of enterprise
certificates of unknown origin; Apple may revoke one, but the stores,
with names like TutuApp and AppValley,
keep popping back up.
The
enterprise program’s dark underbelly earned itself mainstream
recognition earlier this year after it was discovered both Facebook and
Google were using the same distribution trick Testut relied on for
GBA4iOS to install apps that monitored teenagers’ smartphone behavior in
exchange for monthly gift cards. Apple
revoked both companies’ certificates over the apps,
which were in violation of the enterprise program’s terms of service
and would have never been allowed on the App Store in the first place.
But
the renewed attention to the enterprise program and Apple’s lax
enforcement marked a turning point for using it as a way to sidestep iOS
restrictions, as Testut says Apple has since clamped down on access.
Following his showdown with two of the biggest names in technology and
the game industry, Testut started looking for safer ways to try to
distribute his own software.
That’s what makes AltStore unique.
It doesn’t require you to root your Apple device, which voids your
warranty and potentially risks rendering your device inoperable, as most
jailbreak techniques require. You also don’t have to hand access to
your device to a company with unknown motives and suspect privacy
policies and security measures, as is the case with many of the illicit
app stores abusing the enterprise program.
AltStore may get shut down at any moment, but it’s not clear how Apple might do so
AltStore
is a container for apps that you can’t find on the App Store, and it’s
as easily accessible on the iPhone as any app on the web is on your Mac.
In many ways, it represents a bold view of what iOS might look like if
it incorporated more of Google’s philosophy around user freedom that we
see with Android, where users have been sideloading apps, including
emulators, for years.
But whatever changes Apple makes to iOS down the line, either to
appease increasingly frustrated app makers or
avoid potential antitrust regulation,
the reality now is that Testut could get shut down at any moment. That
would spoil his plans to turn AltStore into a budding experimental
platform for other developers to use. The big question is how would
Apple do it, and what might be the ripple effects.
Testut says
he’s not sure it would be easy for Apple to remove the ability for
independent developers to sideload apps without also doing so for DIY
developers, schools, and other organizations that build test apps and
software for personal and internal use.
“It would be interesting
because everything I’m doing, Apple is doing themselves,” Tesut says.
“One heavy-handed approach is [Apple] could completely shut down the
whole service. But that would affect everyone doing this, including
schools, anyone just using their free Apple ID on the side.”
Besides
that, Testut imagines Apple could disable the ability to sync over
Wi-Fi, but that would just mean plugging in your phone once a week to
continue using AltStore and the apps it distributes. “I don’t know how
fast they’d react and what they would do. But even in the worst case, I
think there’s still a path forward for AltStore. As long as iTunes can
sync apps,” he says, “AltStore can work.”
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