AltStore 🤝🏼 A New Social
At A New Social, we believe that interoperability is at the core of user choice. While we focus on the open social web, there are other organizations working towards similar goals for different aspects of our digital lives.
The AltStore is an example of such an organization, focusing on a user- and developer-powered app ecosystem for iOS. They've been working tirelessly to break down the walled garden of the App Store, ensuring that users have a choice of which apps they can install on their devices, while also providing developers with a competing market to distribute their apps on, rather than relying on a monopoly.
Today, AltStore announced another step toward centering their marketplace on users and developers by integrating with the open social web, pushing discovery outside of the core market experience to millions of users across countless platforms.
We're excited to be a part of this project, partnering with the AltStore to bridge accounts from the Fediverse to the ATmosphere via Bridgy Fed so iOS developers can automatically promote their apps across both ecosystems. AltStore accounts will appear on Bluesky, Blacksky, and other ATProto-based services with custom AltStore domains, allowing users to recognize that the accounts originated from them. When a user's ATProto account is bridged, their interactions will also show up on AltStore, making them a part of AltStore's cross-platform social experience.
We also want to thank the AltStore for a generous $20,000 donation as a part of this partnership. Their contribution will be used to fund Bridgy Fed's infrastructure and services that we use to support A New Social. It will help ensure that we can continue running the organization without out-of-pocket expenses from our volunteers for the months ahead.
This partnership is an example of how the open social web can work across organizations, building bridges to bring new experiences that would not be possible in silos. We can't wait to see all the new ways users discover iOS apps, and the kind of communities developers can form around them.
If you believe in our mission and want to see more partnerships like this, you can support us via our Patreon, starting as low as $0.95/month with an annual subscription or $1/month for a monthly subscription.
You can also support us via our merch store, where our People, Not Platforms V1 collection is still available.