AltStore and the Indie App Renaissance

cross-posted from: https://flipboard.video/videos/watch/c0dfea13-7f2a-402c-b47c-50ccd151554b

AltStore co-founders Riley Testut and Shane Gill are the perfect example of necessity being the mother of invention. When Apple denied the launch of their retro video game app, Delta, in 2016, they realized that indie app developers needed another solution — one that could bring apps to communities without Apple dictating the rules and taking a cut.

Founded in 2019, AltStore is that solution. The creators of the first decentralized app store share their journey, including what an open app store means for developers and how they’re investing in the fediverse.

The conversation includes:

1:11 Genesis of AltStore
3:00 Getting Delta in Apple’s App Store
5:34 The Fortnite factor
8:10 The value of an alternative app store
12:04 The difference between putting an app in AltStore v App Store 14:41 Indie market for apps
18:03 Ecosystem safety
21:30 Is AI increasing the total number of apps out there?
22:45 Vibe coding and paths for app distribution
24:42 Fediverse and eureka moment
32:26 People-powered discovery — a broader movement 34:29 Building communities around apps
36:44 Patreon integration, supporting developers directly 38:38 Curating apps and source collections
40:07 Solutions for in-app payments
43:27 Pieces of the next generation ecosystem
45:56 Decentralizing app innovation
46:32 Relationship with Apple now
51:23 What’s on the horizon for AltStore
54:21 How to experience AltStore

Referenced:

Explore AltStore: https://explore.alt.store/
Riley + Shane’s Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/cw/rileyshane

🔎 You can find Riley and Shane at https://altstore.io/.

✚ Connect with host Mike McCue at @[email protected] and @mmccue.bsky.social.

🌊 Catch the wave! Surf the open social web and create your own custom feeds at surf.social, a new product from the people at Flipboard. https://about.surf.social/

Disclosure: Dot Social host Mike McCue serves on the board of AltStore.

Orion for Linux released in Early Beta

The Early Beta Build of Orion for Linux is Now Available!

We know many of you have been eagerly waiting for a chance to try Orion Browser on Linux, and we’ve been hard at work to make progress behind the scenes. After months of building the foundations, we’re excited to share this early beta with you. It’s our first opportunity to let you get hands-on with the new features we’ve been developing.

What’s included in this early beta

Browsing made smoother

The core of Orion is fully connected to the Linux UI, and basic browsing is ready: you can navigate pages, use back, forward, and refresh actions, and start exploring multiple tabs. This milestone lays the groundwork for a more flexible and powerful tab system.

Staying organized and secure

We’ve added password management, history tracking, and Dark Mode and Focus Mode, giving you more control over your browsing experience. Custom search engines can be defined in Settings > Search, making it easy to search directly from the address bar.

Stability and polish

This early beta also brings several fixes that improve reliability - from preventing crashes when closing pinned tabs to resolving freezes in Website Settings, and ensuring new installations allow creating new tabs without issues.

Note:

Kagi Sync and webKit Extensions are still in development and not supported in Beta

✴ Try the Early Beta ✴

You can download the Flatpak build of Orion Browser for Linux here: Download Orion Early Beta (Flatpak)

What’s next

This early beta is just the beginning. Over the coming weeks, we’ll continue refining tab management, expanding WebExtension support and improving stability and usability.

We’d love to hear from you

As always, your thoughts, questions, and suggestions are welcome. They guide us in shaping the future of Orion on Linux, and we’re excited to have you on this journey with us. Go to our dedicated Orion Feedback Website: https://orionfeedback.org

Browse Beyond ✴︎ The Orion for Linux Team

Do you guys remember Bump?

It’s the craziest thing to see something that existed in 2009, and was acquired by Google in 2013, and immediately just abandoned completely, then abandoned AGAIN ("Android Beam") in 2019, only to be revived in 2023 by Apple.

Obviously the new version is better but it’s always fascinating to me how much cool technology is just slept on and ignored.

The Mullvad ad that was banned in the UK

https://mullvad.net/en/and-then/uk

Have you ever seen a more powerful photo?

https://piefed.social/c/Epsteinfiles/p/1777860/have-you-ever-seen-a-more-powerful-photo

Fluxer is another open-source Discord alternative

Several years ago I had a Discord community with hundreds of users. This was an IRL community, so it was very difficult to abandon but I did anyway. Tried to get people to leave but they were unwilling. So I handed it off to another member and deleted my account. Now that admin has contacted me again and let me know everyone is ready to leave. I found Fluxer yesterday while poking around #Discord on Mastodon and I think we’re going to end up there.

Fluxer is still very early in development and they have plans for many advanced features in the roadmap but it’s very feature-rich today. Current monetization plan is freemium + Patreon-like monetization. I understand that may be a dealbreaker for some but there aren’t a ton of other great options, and everything is open source, and self-hostable, and if you do, you get all of the premium features for free, while still communicating with the main instance over federation (in roadmap). That still leaves it susceptible to Mattermost-style enshittification but honestly rolling back updates solves most of those style of problems.

Give your Matrix account a Discord UI with Commet

https://piefed.social/c/technology/p/1766608/give-your-matrix-account-a-discord-ui-with-commet

Recommend games for me