alazyartist

The whole marketplace flow is a disaster. While AltStore seems to have tons of problems itself (mostly due to a payment system that seems incredibly rushed - hey Riley, have your people call my people? 🔥), the majority of the problems are in Apple’s implementation. App installation has no progress prompts. The app-marketplace:// URL scheme, used by websites to tell iOS to begin installing a marketplace app, displays zero progress. It only has the ability to display error messages, such as telling you you’re not eligible (not located in the EU), or that you need to go to Settings to allow the app to be installed. Naturally, there’s no button that takes you to Settings, nor any explanation of what you do when you’re there. Once you’re in Settings, a followup button appears below your Apple ID name. Tapping Allow simply dismisses the prompt. There’s no indication of what happens next. The answer is - nothing happens. You need to go back to Safari and initiate the installation again. Then, you get another full screen prompt, and then an alert prompt. The app then starts downloading, but nothing tells you that. Tapping the download button does nothing now. You just eventually think to go to the home screen and find the app. Awesome, we finally got there! Uh, almost. Now you found an app you’d like to install from the marketplace, so you do so. First, you get a rather ugly prompt in the bottom quarter of your screen - unclear if this is from AltStore or iOS. I mean, yeah, I tapped install the button, of course I’m sure. You then get another full screen prompt like the one above (I ran out of images but it’s the same layout, just with different wording such as “AltStore Would Like To Install an App”). To AltStore’s credit, I was using a slow VPN into the EU, so I don’t know if the lack of progress indication for the first few seconds is their fault or mine. But eventually it shows a progress bar. (Due to what I really hope is an AltStore bug and not an Apple bug, I can’t check if the app shows up with a progress bar on the home screen. I uninstalled Delta, and now I can’t install it any more! It still thinks it’s installed.) Finally, the app is installed! Let’s open it! Tapping the Open button now shows another quarter-screen popup prompt like the above, asking if I’m sure I’d like to open the app. 🙄 Oh well, we got there eventually. This goes back to me being conflicted about where we’re at with this. I both don’t like AltStore working with Apple as if to show that we’re ok with this solution, but also, it is important to show how bad Apple’s solution really is. Make no mistake, if a teenager was able to build a jailbreak that puts a Cydia icon on the home screen with a download progress bar back on iOS 4.3 (2011!), Apple can do far better with user experience here. They know what they’re doing. The sloppiness of the whole process is intentional, and AltStore needing to charge €1.50/year is a barrier Apple fully intended to force upon marketplaces. My bet is that Apple will use the shortcomings to argue to authorities that hey, look, nobody’s using this. Users hate it, the only positive user experience is our App Store. Could you drop the regulations and lawsuits, pretty please?