I put a Reddit customer on my iPhone. I never want to do it again

I have a confession to do: I am an inveterate scrolling of Reddit. But my experience of viewing choice is not the official application of Reddit iOS, but a fantastic third -party customer called Apollo.

The only problem is that it no longer exists in the App Store. Apollo was forcibly closed in June 2023 in what some Redditors considered as an attempted intimidation of Reddit HQ to force competition to the official IOS application of the platform. Like so many others, I was devastated when Apollo closed. With an interface without advertising and a smoother and more stable experience than the official application, not to mention. Tons of quality of life features, such as glimpsed images, gestures in the application, a multitude of personalization options – it was the type of Reddit client who had the impression of belonging to an iPhone.

Fortunately, I had another option. Apollo had created such a faithful fans of users – made a million daily active users at the time of stopping – that many people intervened to make Apollo available long after the end of support. It meant that I could put Apollo aside on my iPhone and restore it in its old glory.

Or I thought. The problem, as I discovered, is that breeding can be monumental pain. I am happy to say that I have Apollo again on my iPhone again, but the whole process was and is a hassle so in progress, and I have a new appreciation for Apple's struggle against the key load.

A long and arduous installation

The lateral Apollo lateral download process is long and convoluted and involves hacks, bypass solutions and workflows Janky. If you are thinking of doing it yourself, you will need a lot of time, endurance and, above all, patience. If you want to follow my traces, I will guide you through, and there are many Reddit guides and threads filled with useful information. But it is absolutely not a beginner's process, and it requires a lot of patience, so get attached, because it is a riding ride.

To start, I decided to use an application called alstore to supervise the key download process and a sidestore called to really install Apollo and keep it updated (so that it works, I would need the two applications). In the case of Apollo (and, I am sure, many other flow applications), you must refresh them every seven days to prevent them from expiring. This is what Sidestore manages.

So, first of all, I downloaded and installed Altstore on my Mac on the application website. I also had to download the Sidestore .IPA – which is an App Store package format used to distribute iOS and iPados applications – and an application called jitterbugpair (more on this subject later).

Foundry

I plugged my iPhone on my Mac via USB-C, then I loaded the Sistore file .IPA on my iPhone using Altstore. This installed Sidestore directly on my iPhone, no App Store store. So far, so good.

Once it was done, I was then asked to enter my Apple identifier. There are reports that Apple could lock the accounts that put Sidel applications. It was only the first of many warning signs that this whole process would be much more involved than installing your daily application.

Then, I had to go to the parameters application of my iPhone to approve the new “development application” added to my phone, then activate the developer mode. Then, I had to open JitterbugPair on my Mac, which generated a torque file so that Sidestore could speak to your device. I downloaded this on iCloud on my Mac. Back on my iPhone, I loaded the torque file in Sidestore.

Notice, I was not even halfway at this point. Now I needed a personalized VPN. This does not connect to an external server, but essentially allows my device to connect to itself via a VPN, which is necessary for Sidestore to be refreshing and all the applications I put next to it. After that, I opened Sidestore and I signed with my Apple Burner identifier. I then had to refresh Sidestore, which took a few minutes-if it was not stuck, that is to say what he often did.

I then downloaded a .ipa file from the latest version of Apollo before closing. This is available on Github; I downloaded it on my Mac and I downloaded it on iCloud. After that, I was able to restart it in Sistore, which installed Apollo on my phone.

Foundry

Finally, once I was connected to my Reddit account in Apollo, I had to create a personalized “application” for Reddit and Imgur in order to obtain a customer ID, which allowed Apollo to speak to API Reddit and Imgur. Then, finally, I was ready to waste the rest of my day scrolling.

If you have arrived so far, congratulations! You could just have enough patience to restart an application on your iPhone.

But there is more, because of course, there are. This laborious process only made Apollo on my phone first – due to the way this iteration of towers breeding works – with the Rinky -Dink combination of burner identifiers and an expired application (more much more) – Apollo will expire after seven days.

You can tell Sidestore to refresh it, but generally it should be done manually. I do not have the patience for that, so I created a personalized workflow in the shortcut application to automatically update Sidestore and Apollo every night when I sleep. It works well most of the time, but I force myself to have both Wi-Fi and the personalized connected VPN.

The struggle is real

Even once I managed to finish Apollo on my phone, there were (and there are always) many irritating problems to face:

• While Wi-Fi and VPN must be connected so that your applications can update in Sidestore, very often, Sidestore refuses to refresh itself, even when everything is present and correct.
• Sidestore's guide links to a direct download for the jitterbugpair command line process, but my Mac automatically blocked it and refused to execute it. I had to download the Jitterbug parent app and generate a dating file in a different way.
• Sidestore's required refreshment process has often been stuck halfway, which means that it would never be able to cool off automatically and had to be reinstalled.
• As the process is (clearly) confusing, I sometimes implemented an application by using Altstore instead of Sidestore. This meant that Sidestore could not refresh the application, which in turn meant that he would expire after a week.
• Updating your iOS device will sometimes be – but not always – Break Sistore, which means that you have to redo the entire installation process.

And, of course, there is the problem you download from the apps and random files from the Internet, none of which followed the App Store examination process.

I am a reddit addict that for me, this convoluted process was finally worth it. I have my favorite Reddit client and I no longer have to use the official application. But I hope I will never have to start again.

Apple is right

More than anything, all this funny gave me a new appreciation of the App Store and a new understanding of the reasons why Apple opposes farming. The App Store gets a lot of flak for its rules and regulations, but it makes the download and execution of applications remarkably easy. You don't even need to think about it – you just have to download an application and that's it, working perfectly on your device.

The key outfit – at least in my case – was the polar opposite of this. This required all kinds of steps and tortuous steps, and even when you follow them to the letter, things can and will be mistaken. Admittedly, it would be different if Apple allowed breeding – or “alternative application stores” as in the EU – but even when authorized, the process is much more complicated than the installation of an application of the App Store.

Foundry

I can see why Apple hates it all. The company's products are supposed to be simple and easy to use – so simple, in fact, that a grandparent could buy an iPhone and install an application. Do you really think that your grandparents or even your parents would have the means to install an expired application using a button download process, Apple burner identifies and pairing files, then configure a personalized shortcut to make sure everything continues to work without expiration?

Not only does the key outfit go against Apple's penchant for simplicity, but it has enormous potential to frustrate users of the company. And which user will have a favorable opinion on your product if a key element of it – the installation of applications – can be so irritating? (And that says nothing about the potential for virus and malicious software.)

That said, none of this will prevent me from using Apollo. I am ready to endure the download process, which is for as long as it takes. But I can absolutely understand why people want to avoid the gap – and why Apple has opposed it for so long.