Bill Ottman of Minds recently revealed that the social network’s application was at risk of being removed from the Google Play Store. Their developers pushed a version that removed search, discover, and comment functionality, which was accepted. They also released an update for iOS to match the changes on Android — I suspect in anticipation of similar concerns from Apple.

I’m not too familiar with Minds, I’ve only really heard about it in the past week or so. But from what I’ve seen, it seems fairly tame when compared to very easily discoverable content on Twitter, which doesn’t even seem close to being at risk of App Store removal.

But in my poking around Minds, I saw Bill Ottman mention AltStore — an application and service that smooths out the rough edges for sideloading apps on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. I forgot it even existed.

But now I’m curious about how much of a role AltStore could have going forward. And how welcoming they’ll be to some of these more controversial social applications.

If the folks at Parler or Minds start releasing their apps in AltStore, will Apple make more of an effort to prevent the sort-of loop hole from being utilized? Will there be pressure on Apple to allow apps from non-App Store sources? Will their be similar pressure in the opposite direction?

➝ Source: altstore.io