Im not usually someone who posts negative stuff, but my god has the Appstore gone down the shitter.
For context, for the last ~3,5 years I wasn’t really actively using any iOS devices. I had an iPad but used it rarely and only really as a Video machine. But now I’m setting up a XS I got for a killer price used (<60€) and of course I looked into the Appstore what the hot new Apps are. And my god nearly everything either constantly asks you for a subscription to use basic shit, is slow af or full of ads.
For example the „Favorite of the week“ an App called iScanner in my case took 4 seconds (!) to show me anything, which an is abysmal launch time, then shows me the Google ad tracking dialog followed by a clicking the „next“ button 5 times to show me nonsense company propaganda, followed by dialog to subscribe for 4,99€ a month. For a fucking document scanning app. And Apple has the gull to put this garbage in their weekly curated recommendations! And this isn’t the only example. 80% of Apps I downloaded today were removed within 5 minutes.
I’m honestley smitten by how bad things seem to have gotten. Really the only saving grace is that Apples own built-in Apps have gotten really good, in most cases to the point where downloading something else seems unnecessary. But still things seem to have taken a nose dive over the last 3 years.
Also to more active Apple users whats your way to find high quality Apps?
It’s not a desert. The FOSS apps are there, but you can’t use the App Store to find them.
so you can’t find anywhere, you couldn’t side load apps before EU fixed it
You certainly can, it just isn’t straight forward.
ok yeah I checked a list on github and indeed thats quite a list. But how do you actually get them on your phone?
I know there is a method sideloadly, but that is not really practical given that you constantly have to re-sign apps.
I’ve found a lot of them are on the AppStore, you just have to follow the link from the GitHub page or search for it on the AppStore. These apps just usually won’t be featured on the AppStore, I assume because they generally aren’t going to generate revenue for Apple.
As a side note, I find it really annoying that I can’t install an app remotely on my device. It’s been a little while since I used Android, but it was really convenient if I wasn’t on my phone but found an interesting app that I could authenticate into the Play Store, select which device I wanted to add the app to, and it would install remotely. It doesn’t seem like that can be done with the iPhone and it’s slowly becoming my leading complaint as they fix my other annoyances since switching from Android to iPhone.
its not quite the same as on Android with the Playstore, but you can enable a feature called „App Downlods“ which automatically syncs your installed Apps among your iOS devices. Its under Settings -> App Store -> App downloads
I’ve done that, but this is mostly an issue when I’m on my Mac and the links open in the AppStore and say it’s not compatible with my Mac.