Comment by mshish
19 hours ago
I imagine official support for 3rd party app stores might open up some options for easily installing apps. However, that might require the store adding support for this type of iOS install or a newer version of iOS with 3rd party app store support.
>I imagine official support for 3rd party app stores might open up some options for easily installing apps
Given you own the OS, that's not an issue. You can make it pre-jailbroken and load whatever third party app store if you want. The bigger issue is that no app store = no "normie" apps like uber or google maps. I suspect most of the stock apps won't work either because they enforce device attestation on the backend endpoints, so it'll be miserable to use. Note in the maps screenshot, there's nothing behind the modal. It's just blank, suggesting it can't load the map tiles. You'd be better off using an android skinned as ios (possibly vibedcoded) than using this mess.
There's several PoCs showcasing Apple Maps loading just fine on X
Someone is going to set up an unofficial app store for this and fill it with pirated and malware-ridden apps. Then some companies will be convinced into releasing .ipsw files for "debug and research" purposes and starts taking subscription through those installs. Then Apple will lose choices but to support randomly downloaded .ipsw files on regular iOS devices to avoid becoming the lesser option against those, and we could slowly crawl back to the code freedom we had in 2006. Or this gets DMCA'd in 3 hours and nothing will come of it.
I doubt it, tbh. How many people will install such a HackIOS in the best case, 1000? 10000? There have to be a billion or more iOS users out there, so the pressure on app vendors or Apple will be negligible.