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How an iOS developer built an alternative App Store for the iPhone

Riley Testut has spent the better part of the last decade trying to sneak in through the side door of the iPhone. Since he was a teenager, the Dallas-Fort Worth native has been fascinated with app development — in particular, with emulation technology that allows modern computing devices to run the video game software of decades-old game consoles.

Yet Testut, a longtime Apple fan, was disheartened when he came to realize that classic video games from developers like Nintendo would never make their way onto the official iOS App Store. Nintendo has no interest in porting its games to iOS — it has since opted to make mobile-specific versions instead — and Apple has always had strict policies against apps that can be used for piracy. So Testut decided to try to build the emulation technology that would let you do it yourself.

AltStore is a way to distribute iPhone apps that are not allowed on the official App Store

"As a kid, I played all these games, and so I just came across some code that I thought I could turn into an app to play Game Boy games, and that just started a whole thing," Testut says. "I just found myself in this whole emulation scene. I probably don't know if I would have picked it really if I had thought through everything. Because it's a lot to work on these apps, knowing that they're not going to be in the App Store ever."

His initial emulation work, spanning the last two years of high school, resulted in a Game Boy emulator known as GBA4iOS. It made headlines in 2014 when both Apple and Nintendo moved to shut his project down. (GBA4iOS lived on for some time, thanks to a clever loophole, but it is no longer available.)

Now, Testut, a 22-year-old freelance software developer living in Los Angeles, may have figured out a way for his software to live on Apple's iOS platform for good. He calls it AltStore, and it's an alternative mobile app distribution platform that lets anyone download software that's not available on the official App Store.

The store's very first app: Delta, a GBA4iOS successor Testut has been building since well before he entered the University of Southern California a half-decade ago. The really interesting part is that none of it requires you to jailbreak your iPhone, so it's available to anyone who's willing to download it, for free.

Delta is a powerful app with the kind of polish you'd expect from a major software maker. It lets anyone run corresponding game files for NES, SNES, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and even Nintendo 64 consoles. Testut is also working on Nintendo DS emulation and other related projects for future updates. It's the kind of app Apple would never allow, but it's also the kind of software iPhone users have been dreaming about for years.

"It's more fun working on it for iOS because, yeah, on Android, I could just release a tiny [emulator]. But on iOS, I know that people want this. I know people want to relive those games. I also know that so many people have iPhones. I have an iPhone," he says. "So I want to bring what I know people want to everyone. That's really the motivation here."

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