is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
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AltStore PAL, which launched as one of the first alternative iOS app stores in the EU last year, is coming to more countries, developer Riley Testut announced today. “Specifically, we plan to launch in Japan, Brazil, and Australia before the end of the year, with the UK to follow in 2026,” Testut says. Launching in more countries is “by far our number one request,” though the AltStore team is still waiting to hear more from Apple “on exact timing.”
Testut also says that AltStore is making a big push into the fediverse by using the ActivityPub protocol to “federate apps, app updates, and news alerts from AltStore to the open social web.” Here’s how that will work, according to Testut:
Each AltStore source will receive its own ActivityPub account, which can then be followed by any other open social web account. You’ll be able to like, boost, and reply to everything, and most importantly all these interactions will appear natively in AltStore. In other words, you’ll be able to comment on an app on Mastodon, like a news update on Threads, then open AltStore and view all these same interactions in-app.
The AltStore team is working with Mastodon gGmbH to “manage a custom Mastodon server on our behalf” (it’s available in beta now) and with the non-profit A New Social to support Bluesky using the Bridgy Fed tool. The fediverse features will come to AltStore PAL in “the next few months,” Testut says.
AltStore is also getting a $6 million investment from Patreon board member Chris Paik’s Pace Capital so the team can hire more staff and add “the necessary bandwidth to finalize Fediverse integration and expand AltStore worldwide,” Testut says. Paik will join AltStore’s board of directors, as will Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, who is a big fan of the fediverse.