How an iOS Developer Built an Alternative App Store for the iPhone

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How an iOS developer built an alternative App Store for the iPhone

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.

Yet Testut, a longtime Apple fan, was disheartened when he came to realize that classic video games from developers like Nintendo would never make their way onto the official iOS App Store. Nintendo has no interest in porting its games to iOS - it has since opted to make mobile-specific versions instead - and Apple has always had strict policies against apps that can be used for piracy. So Testut decided to try to build the emulation technology that would let you do it yourself.

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.)

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