Independent iOS Developer Blog
In April of last year, we launched AltStore PAL in the European Union as one of the first official alternative app marketplaces on iOS thanks to the Digital Markets Act. We launched with just 2 apps — my Nintendo emulator Delta and clipboard manager Clip — yet Apple immediately changed their App Store rules to allow emulators worldwide for the first time ever.
This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for over 10 years.
10 years ago today, I released GBA4iOS — a passion project my friend Paul Thorsen and I built during our senior year of high school. I’ve reflected many times over the impact GBA4iOS had on my life (many, many, times), but for the 10th anniversary I wanted to try something different.
After more than a year in development, I’m thrilled to announce Delta 1.3 is now available and brings support for playing Nintendo DS games to everyone 🥳
One year ago, I launched AltStore as a brand new way to sideload apps not allowed in the App Store, including my Nintendo emulator Delta. Since then, the conversation regarding sideloading and Apple’s control over the App Store has grown tremendously. In just the past year:
One year ago, I was preparing for the upcoming launch of AltStore — my attempt at building an alternative App Store for non-jailbroken devices (maybe you’ve heard of it). I originally built AltStore as a way to distribute Delta, but soon pivoted towards a more general distribution platform for all sideloadable apps. However, if I was going to launch a whole app store and frame it as such, surely…
I honestly can’t believe I’m finally writing about all of this. Everything in this blog post is something I’ve been working on in some form or another for the past several years. In order to make sure I didn’t shoot myself in the foot by revealing too much, however, I didn’t allow myself to talk about anything other than Delta during the whole process 😅 But now, finally, it’s time to reveal the…
I am very confident that Delta will be released this summer. Trust me, I’m ready to get Delta out there and begin working on my next projects, so I’m going to do everything in my power to meet that release timeframe.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a brand new project I’m happy to share with you all: Delta Lite. Delta Lite is a Swift Playground that allows you to play any NES game in the Swift Playgrounds app on your iPad. Despite being a playground, Delta Lite is essentially a complete iOS app, and it supports standard emulation features such as save states and cheat codes, as well as Delta’s…
Naturally, 2 weeks after I wrote my last blog post promising updates every 2 weeks, I realized I was on Spring Break in Europe, and would be unable to write and publish one. “Not a big deal,” I thought, “I’ll just write one when I get home!” Then, of course, I find out there are a lot of assignments for school due in the couple weeks after Spring Break, so I ended up not having time to write a…