what you’re seeing in the iPhone sideloading space is a product of a lot of hard work by many different people over many years. AltServer and the like (what I assume you’re referring to) are the best solutions we have, but come with significant downsides - iOS updates breaking the software, limits on how many apps you can install (last time i checked, you could only install 3), time constraints (need to ”re-sign” apps every week), software constraints (still can’t use JIT or other private APIs without Apple’s blessing), and - relative to using the App Store or Android sideloading - the setup procedure is pretty complicated. on both Macs and PCs, AltServer can be kind of difficult to set up.

all of this has prevented a legitimate sideloading scene from truly emerging on the iPhone - which, depending on where you ideologically stand on this, could be considered monopolistic.

i think there’s definitely room to make the process a lot easier - even if it’s just for power users.

When I first looked into this, free Apple developer accounts could also only use limited app entitlements: so no network extensions, VPN profiles, Apple push notifications, or other capabilities. NetworkExtension is basically the only reason I’m interested in iOS development at all, so a paid account was not optional.

It used to not be possible at all, and now you still have to repeat it regularly if you want to keep using the sideloaded application, which makes it close to useless for anything else than development. Of course, doing it on anything else than macOS is a huge PITA too.

It was always possible. Buy a developer certificate. $100/year, when whole iPhone is like $1500 is not that expensive. Consider it a premium service.

The whole iPhone I got was $100 itself, second hand, some older version that was still useful for development. Its purpose was to let me port my game engine to iOS. I managed to port a single app, run it on the phone and then decided to forget about iOS at all. The necessary effort to deal with all that stuff is crazy and it's better to spend all that time elsewhere.

Today that phone stays in the drawer and I can't run that app on it anymore; I'd probably have to spend hours figuring things out again just to redeploy it so I can launch it on my phone.

Meanwhile, on my actual phone, I can just scp a deb package and install it with dpkg, and it works until I uninstall it myself.