What does HackerNews think of AltStore?
AltStore is an alternative app store for non-jailbroken iOS devices.
Language:
Swift
Side loading is already possible. Yes, you can only do it for a few days at a time, but that's why there's an easy tool that will refresh the application for you.
I haven't heart of social engineering involving https://github.com/altstoreio/AltStore but maybe you know something I don't. Either way, installing apps onto iOS devices over the network exists today.
Tech illiterate people are barely installing new apps on their phones, let alone separate app stores. Almost everyone I know runs Android and I've never seen F-Droid or Aurora or any other alternative app store on their phones.
Scammers can already trick your mother into installing their apps. https://altstore.io/ exists and is widely used to install an emulator and some other apps Apple has deemed unworthy of their users' attention. The source is here: https://github.com/altstoreio/AltStore
That’s a weird question, I’m not sure what you mean by safe. The source [1] was the 3rd result on Google. You could build it yourself. The author puts their real name and face on the project.
I don't think that this will convince you but it's open source (https://github.com/altstoreio/AltStore), and you could a separate Apple ID specifically only for signing (https://faq.altstore.io/getting-started/troubleshooting-guid...). This is probably the least clunky way of doing it since that Apple still doesn't allow sideloading.