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Reddit tests automatic, whole-site translation into French using LLM-based AI | TechCrunch

May 8, 2024 7:59 PM0


Reddit — now a publicly-traded company with more scrutiny on revenue growth — is putting a big focus on boosting its international audience, starting with francophones. In their first-ever earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman confirmed the company is now working on automatic translations of the site’s content, in real-time, into French, thanks to advances in large language models.

He also touched on ecosystem expansion by way of a couple of u-turns. It wants to court developers with new tools — a surprise given the company’s history on this front; and it is planning a reintroduction of Reddit Gold — another surprise considering the company canned its virtual currency efforts less than a year ago.

Moves like these are anticipating what the future, rather than the present, might look like for Reddit. Today, its news is relatively encouraging, with Reddit’s revenue in the last quarter jumping 48% year-over-year to $243 million, and unique users growing 37% to 82.7 million. (That figure includes both logged-in and logged-out users, similar to how Twitter — now called X — used to count its audience when it was public.)

User growth and translation

Huffman, speaking on the earnings call, said that half of Reddit’s audience is U.S.-based, which points to the company putting more focus on how to increase the international proportion.

“We’re still 50/50 U.S. versus non-U.S., but our peers are more than 80% to 90% non-U.S.,” he said. “I think there’s a huge opportunity there.” He went on to describe automatic, AI-powered translation as “one of the big unlocks for us in the near to medium term.”

“So we’re translating our entire corpus today that is mostly in English into the other languages and hope that will help accelerate international growth,” he said.

The site-wide translation effort is still a test, in his words, although there is a lot of resource being put into it. Huffman noted that this content is also being indexed on Google results for the French language, driving more traffic to the site, and the company next wants to tackle Spanish.

Reddit been offering post-based translation since last year with support for eight languages.

Developer tools

It was surreal to hear Huffman talk about developer tools on the call. It was only in July 2023 that the company found itself embroiled in a massive feud with third-party client developers over API changes — resulting in the blackout of hundreds of subreddits in protest of API changes.

Now the social network is in play-nice mode. Huffman said there are plans for tools that could “push the boundaries of what a subreddit can be.” He gave examples of some ongoing experiments like live scores on some sports subreddits and a live stock ticker on r/wallstreetbets, the subreddit known for the Gamestop stock saga.

A few hundred developers are already testing these new experiences, he said. Reddit aims to include more developers from the waitlist this summer and enable monetization features later in the year.

Other announcements

Earlier this year, Reddit signed a deal with Google to let the search engine company use the social network’s data. In answering a question from the Reddit community, Huffman said that the company plans to license data to other companies as well. This has been a big issue, and in many cases controversial in light of the fact that users may not want their data being used for, say, AI training or some of the other common purposes these days. For what it’s worth, Huffman, you might have guessed, insisted that the company is being “considerate and selective” in how it selects partners.

The name of the game for the company right now is building more infrastructure for revenue generation. So while Gold and another currency effort, blockchain-based community points, were both canned last year, virtual currency is going to getting another airing on the platform because it represents an opportunity for Reddit to diversify its business model. During the earnings call, the company noted that it plans to launch a “revamped” Gold product, with programs for users to spend and earn money on the platform.

Last month, Reddit CPO Pali Bhat mentioned some of these new initiatives in an interview with TechCrunch, and now the company is making moves to leverage those growth instruments.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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Belgium's Aikido lands $17M Series A for its 'no BS' security platform aimed at developers | TechCrunch

May 1, 2024 7:23 PM0


Developers have a problem. It used to be the case that only large enterprises needed to worry themselves with security, but today, every startup is capable of holding huge amounts of customer data. That means developers across the board have to worry about how secure their platform is, and they often find themselves grappling with complicated tools to manage security.

Now, Aikido, a small startup in Ghent, Belgium, thinks it has an answer to that dilemma: A no-nonsense, open-source, developer-facing security platform. And the startup has just raised a $17 million Series A to further build out its product.

“There have been security tools for three decades, but I think we’re the first where the buyer is the user. With other tools, the CSO is the buyer, but then some poor developer is the user. We are the ‘no BS’ platform,” Aikido’s founder and CTO, Willem Delbare, told TechCrunch.

He has a point.

Aikido’s main competitors tend to make tools that are aimed at larger enterprises than the people who actually have to deploy the tools. Enterprise platform Snyk, for example, used to resemble Aikido, but pivoted to larger firms some time ago. Other competitors include JIT, which caters to small-to-mid market customers. In the middle market, you have Endor Labs, Guardrails, and then you have larger companies like Mend, Qwiet, Oxeye, Ox, Arnica and Apiiro .

Delbare told me that Aikido’s main differentiators are that it has a freemium model and it actively open-sources new products. “This makes us flexible, fast, and affordable,” he said.

The company also offers all-in-one security, flat pricing, and a lot less notifications. “We only bother developers when something ‘real’ is wrong. We aggressively triage alerts to cut noise and false-positives,” he said.

That logic seems to have worked fairly well: The company already has 3,000 small-to-midsize customers. And this Series A, led by European venture firm Singular, comes less than 6 months after the company raised a $5 million seed round. The company has now raised a total of $22.5 million.

Another aspect that sets Aikido apart is that it’s based in Ghent. The security industry is dominated by Israeli and U.S. incumbents, and their veterans (the security industry’s version of the ‘PayPal Mafia’ is called ‘the Checkpoint Mafia‘).

Delbare said there’s a certain “playbook” that U.S. or Israeli security startups follow: “They take a very technically advanced security feature, become really good at it, raise a ton of cash, and then two years later, get bought by Palo Alto Networks or Cisco. And then they just repeat that playbook over and over.”

He stressed that Aikido doesn’t follow that pattern. “We’re not doing that kind of playbook. We’re not one single feature. If we ever get bought, it will just be for our customer base and the revenue. Not for a platform that fixes a feature gap,” he said.

“These tools basically look like the inside of an F-16’s cockpit. They make you feel dumb. A developer just wants to fix problems and move on with building fun features, right?” Delbare explained.

Delbare said Aikido decided to go with Singular after meeting its partner, Henri Tilloy. “I think he’s the first VC I’ve talked to in a long time who actually understood the product. Most VCs look at your company and they just see a spreadsheet,” he said.

Also in the team are co-founders Roeland Delrue (CRO and COO), and Felix Garriau (CMO). The company has brought on Madeline Lawrence, who left her role as a partner at Peak VC to join the startup as its chief brand officer.

The round also saw participation from Notion Capital and Connect Ventures, both of which co-led the previous seed round.

Aikido is tackling a large market. The network security software market is expected to increase from $24.21 billion in 2023 to $27.33 billion in 2024.

At the same time, security risks are mutating and growing rapidly, with the average cost of a data breach reaching record highs of $4.45 million in 2023, according to Upguard.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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RevenueCat raises $12M Series C as it expands its subscription management to the web | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 8:41 PM0


RevenueCat, a top subscription management platform for apps that monetize via in-app purchases, is now flush with new capital as it expands to the web. The company has closed on a $12 million Series C led by Adjacent, following the launch of a new product, RevenueCat Billing, that allows web app developers to integrate subscription purchases into any website. Later, it will also support Roku.

The timing of the product’s launch is notable, as it arrives amid the implementation of the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulation, which is forcing Apple to open up the iPhone and the App Store to new completion. As a result, Apple initially blocked iPhone web apps (Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs) in the E.U., likely fearing developers would abandon its App Store, before reversing that decision under regulatory pressure.

For RevenueCat, however, the changes ahead for iOS — not to mention Apple’s refusal to cut its default 15%-30% commission rate — mean there are now more developers who are looking to the web to monetize their apps.

“It could be for progressive web apps or any kind of customer that wants to take payments outside of the App Store,” explains RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting, of the new web billing product. “It’s going to play within all the new [DMA] rules…it’s going to be a pretty significant product expansion for us,” he said.

The company says it moved in this direction because of the inbound interest from developers. Even if they didn’t have a web app, many developers wanted to shift their customers to the web to pay.

Though Stripe already enables this functionality, what developers were lacking was a system that’s specifically designed for consumer subscription apps. Now, even if developers are processing payments through Stripe or others, they’re getting their data and insights in the same format and within the same dashboard where they already manage their in-app purchase data. This makes it easier for them to focus on how their subscription apps are monetizing, overall, regardless of where the payment comes from — web or mobile.

Though Apple has historically not allowed app developers to steer customers to the web from inside their iOS apps, it has permitted steering from other channels — like the developer’s website or emails to customers. The E.U.’s DMA rules should also permit developers to steer customers to the web from inside their mobile apps, too.

With RevenueCat Billing, essentially a web SDK, developers can accept subscription payments from any website. It joins other recent product releases like Paywall, Targeting, and Experiments, which are all designed to help developers grow their revenue. Today, RevenueCat powers subscriptions in over 30,000 apps and handles over $2 billion in subscriptions annually, it says.

The new Series C from Adjacent (led by Nico Wittenborn — a Series A investor, now board member) totals $12 million. Other investors include Y Combinator, Index Ventures, Volo Ventures, and SaaStr Fund. Ahead of this round, RevenueCat had raised $56 million, bringing its total raise to $68+ million.

In addition to fueling its new products, the fundraise will help RevenueCat expand to new markets, including Japan and South Korea.

“Our main competitor is ‘cobbling together monetization technology yourself’,” said RevenueCat CTO and co-founder Miguel Carranza, in a statement about the fundraise and expansions. “In the U.S., we’ve done a good job at educating developers, product people, marketers, and CEOs on the challenges of building in-house. In many other regions, it’s unfortunately still the default for businesses to sink valuable resources into something that provides zero differentiation or value for that business’s end users. We’re investing in those regions by expanding our support for languages and local currencies later this year, deepening our relationships with local technology partners and agencies, as well as hiring in-market where possible,” he added.

Image Credits: RevenueCat

RevenueCat is not yet a profitable company, but Eiting says that profitability is always on the horizon. The company still has the money it raised in 2021 and now has over $40 million in the bank in addition to around $20 million in ARR. It has also halved its burn rate since last summer.

“There’s so much stuff we can build by deploying capital and doing it on a profitable basis would just slow us down right now. So while there’s access to capital, which isn’t always the case…the best thing for our customers and investors is to take more capital and deploy it faster,” he told TechCrunch.

“RevenueCat is too important to too many apps to risk the company driving towards a financial cliff. This may be counter to the prevailing narrative of how venture-backed companies should be built, but our investors are aligned with us and know that Miguel and I are leading the company to maximize the value for developers. Investors make more money when developers make more money,” the CEO added in a blog post. “To that end, we’re still aiming to take the company public in this decade,” he said.




Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Fintech gaming startup Sanlo’s webshop tool could help developers avoid costly app store fees | TechCrunch

April 24, 2024 8:38 PM0


Sanlo, a fintech startup that helps gaming companies manage finances, announced Wednesday the closed beta launch of its webshop tool, giving select game developers and studios a plug-in-play solution that works alongside their existing tech stacks. Gaming companies can join the waitlist starting today.

With Google and Apple charging a 30% fee for in-app purchases (IAPs), it’s more challenging than ever for small- to mid-size gaming companies to run profitable businesses. Gaming giant Epic has complained about Apple’s revenue cut for years now, accusing it of being predatory toward smaller businesses.

As a result, many mobile game developers are no longer relying on app stores for monetization and are turning to external webshops, a rising trend in gaming where companies can run stores on their own websites for a much lower fee (around 4-10%). Plus, webshops are believed to boost revenue since players buy directly from the gaming company, as opposed to app stores taking a portion of the sales. In fact, Sanlo said developers can earn up to 25% additional revenue with a webshop.

“A workshop is one of those super tactical steps that actually proved to show that you can implement revenue from,” Sanlo co-founder and CEO Olya Caliujnaia told TechCrunch. “The reason being that it’s usually your most engaged, loyal players who go to the webshop and they get special offers that allow them to do better in the game.”

Image Credits: Sanlo

With Sanlo’s new webshop tool, game developers get a range of promotional mechanics like exclusive digital items, bundle packs, discounted offers, and loyalty programs to incentivize more players to try the game. Developers can also access player data so they can monitor profiles and purchase activity in order to target individual users with compelling offers.

Companies can test and set pricing “with no price caps,” according to Sanlo. Earnings from webshop sales are deposited into the developer’s account once a week.

One downside about webstores is that Apple and Google don’t let mobile games advertise them in-app. Sanlo offers marketing tools as a solution to this issue, such as in-game prompts to promote the webshop, sending emails to returning visitors, and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) attribution tracking.

Sanlo has onboarded an undisclosed number of gaming companies to its webshop platform, including Fusebox Games, the developer behind mobile titles inspired by “Love Island” IP.

“The biggest attraction for me was the plug-and-play nature of the Sanlo tool in addition to the hands-on service they provide,” Terry Lee, COO at Fusebox, told us. “We are a small company without the internal resources to cover all the bases when it comes to supporting a whole new technical capability.”

Sanlo plans to officially launch the new product to all developers this summer.

Caliujnaia and William Liu (CTO) founded Sanlo in 2020. The company’s team touts having previous experience at Sony PlayStation, Electronic Arts, Visa, Facebook, Capital One, Earnest, SigFig, and more.

To date, the company has raised $13.5 million in total funding, and is backed by Initial Capital, Portage Ventures, XYZ Venture Capital, London Venture Partners, Index Ventures, and Konvoy.

Webstore solutions have existed for years now, from more established companies like Xsolla to newer entrants like Appcharge. Popular games leveraging webshops include Clash of Clans, Marvel Strike Force, Game of Thrones: Conquest, and Star Trek Fleet Command.

Sanlo, a startup that offers app and game developers access to financial tools and capital, raises $10M

Sanlo raises $3.5M to help apps and games gain access to financial insights and capital


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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Apex Legends hacker says game developers patched exploit used on streamers | TechCrunch

April 18, 2024 7:41 PM0


Last month, a hacker wreaked havoc during an esports tournament of the popular shooter game Apex Legends, hacking two well-known streamers mid-game to make it look like they were using cheats.

A month later, it seems like the hacking saga may have come to a close with the game developers patching the bug exploited by the hacker.

Because of the hack, the organizers had to suspend the tournament on March 17. Two days later, Apex Legends developer Respawn said on its official X account that it had “deployed the first of a layered series of updates to protect the Apex Legends player community.” Then a week later, the company wrote that it had “added another update that is intended to further protect our players and ensure the competitive integrity of Apex Legends.”

Respawn’s posts don’t clearly say that the updates patched the bugs exploited during the tournament. But the hacker behind the cheating scandal told TechCrunch this week that Respawn’s patches fixed the vulnerability that he had exploited to hack the two streamers.

“The exploit I’ve used in [Apex Legends Global Series] is fully patched,” the hacker who goes by Destroyer2009 said in an online chat.

Destroyer2009, who previously told TechCrunch that he had hacked the two streamers “for fun,” said he didn’t want to reveal any technical details of the bug he exploited, even if it is now patched.

“No one likes when severe vulnerabilities in your product are exposed publicly. I asked my friend and we both agreed that we don’t really want to publicly expose what happened from a technical perspective yet,” the hacker said, referring to a friend he worked with to develop the hack.

Contact Us

Do you know more about this hack? Or other video game hacking incidents? From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram, Keybase and Wire @lorenzofb, or email. You also can contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.

Referring to an unrelated botched in-game update by Respawn this week, Destroyer2009 said: “[I] don’t think embarrassing them even more is fair.”

Destroyer2009 said he tested his exploit after Respawn’s announcement of the second update on March 26, although he said it’s possible it was patched sooner because he didn’t have a chance to test it before.

Destroyer2009’s hacks were high-profile, disruptive, and caused a big stir in the Apex Legends community. The two streamers targeted, ImperialHal and Geburten, collectively have 2.5 million followers on the game streaming platform Twitch, and several other Apex Legends players and streamers commented on the news of the hacks on their channels.

Yet, Respawn isn’t being forthcoming about the patches it released. TechCrunch asked Respawn and Electronic Arts, the owners of the development studio, to confirm whether the exploit used by Destroyer2009 is indeed patched, and if so, when it was patched.

But neither Respawn nor Electronic Arts responded to TechCrunch’s multiple requests for comment. The two companies did not respond to requests for comment in the last few weeks either.

Meanwhile, Destroyer2009 said he won’t do any more public hacks for now, because “anything more severe than the [Apex tournament hack] accident will be already considered as a real hacking with all the consequences so [probably] will just play the game until it gets boring as usual.”




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Watch: Google's Gemini Code Assist wants to use AI to help developers

April 18, 2024 7:17 PM0


Can AI eat the jobs of the developers who are busy building AI models? The short answer is no, but the longer answer is not yet settled. News this week that Google has a new AI-powered coding tool for developers, straight from the company’s Google Cloud Next 2024 event in Las Vegas, means that competitive pressures between major tech companies to build the best service to help coders write more code, more quickly is still heating up.

Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot service that has similar outlines has been steadily working toward enterprise adoption. Both companies want to eventually build developer-helping tech that can understand a company’s codebase, allowing it to offer up more tailored suggestions and tips.

Startups are in the fight as well, though they tend to focus more tailored solutions than the broader offerings from the largest tech companies; Pythagora, Tusk and Ellipsis from the most recent Y Combinator batch are working on app creation from user prompts, AI agents for bug-squashing and turning GitHub comments into code, respectively.

Everywhere you look, developers are building tools and services to help their own professional cohort.

Developers learning to code today won’t know a world in which they don’t have AI-powered coding helps. Call it the graphic calculator era for software builders. But the risk — or the worry, I suppose — is that in time the AI tools that are ingesting mountains of code to get smarter to help humans do more will eventually be able to do enough that fewer humans are needed to do the work of writing code for companies themselves. And if a company can spend less money and employ fewer people, it will; no job is safe, but some roles are just more difficult to replace at any given moment.

Thankfully, given the complexities of modern software services, ever-present tech debt and an infinite number of edge cases, what big tech and startups are busy building today seem to be very useful coding helps and not something ready to replace or even reduce the number of humans building them. For now. I wouldn’t take the other end of that bet on a multi-decade time frame.

And for those looking for an even deeper dive into what Google revealed this week, you can head here for our complete rundown, including details on exactly how Gemini Code Assist works, and Google’s in-depth developer walkthrough from Cloud Next 2024.


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Google launches Code Assist, its latest challenger to GitHub's Copilot | TechCrunch

April 17, 2024 5:57 PM0


At its Cloud Next conference, Google on Tuesday unveiled Gemini Code Assist, its enterprise-focused AI code completion and assistance tool.

If this sounds familiar, that’s likely because Google previously offered a similar service under the now-defunct Duet AI branding. That one became generally available in late 2023, but even then, Google already hinted that it would move the service away from its Codey model to Gemini in the near future. Code Assist is both a rebrand of the older service as well as a major update.

Code Assist, which Google Cloud demoed at its 30,000-attendee conference in Las Vegas, will be available through plug-ins for popular editors like VS Code and JetBrains.

Even more so than the Duet AI version, Code Assist is also a direct competitor to GitHub’s Copilot Enterprise and not so much the basic version of Copilot. That’s because of a few Google-specific twists.

Among those is support for Gemini 1.5 Pro, which famously has a million-token context window, allowing Google’s tool to pull in a lot more context than its competitors. Google says this means more-accurate code suggestions, for example, but also the ability to reason over and change large chunks of code.

“This upgrade brings a massive 1 million-token context window, which is the largest in the industry. This allows customers to perform large-scale changes across your entire code base, enabling AI-assisted code transformations that were not possible before,” Brad Calder, Google’s VP and GM for its cloud platform and technical infrastructure, explained in a press conference ahead of Tuesday’s announcement.

Image Credits: Google

Like GitHub Enterprise, Code Assist can also be fine-tuned based on a company’s internal code base.

“Code customization using RAG with Gemini Code Assist significantly increased the quality of Gemini’s assistance for our developers in terms of code completion and generation,” said Kai Du, Director of Engineering and Head of Generative AI at Turing. “With code customization in place, we are expecting a big increase in the overall code-acceptance rate.”

This functionality is currently in preview.

Image Credits: Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch

Another feature that makes Code Assist stand out is its ability to support codebases that sit on-premises, in GitLab, GitHub and Atlassian’s BitBucket, for example, as well as those that may be split between different services. That’s something Google’s most popular competitors in this space don’t currently offer.

Google is also partnering with a number of developer-centric companies to bring their knowledge bases to Gemini. Stack Overflow already announced its partnership with Google Cloud earlier this year. Datadog, Datastax, Elastic, HashiCorp, Neo4j, Pinecone, Redis, Singlestore and Snyk are now also partnering with Google through similar partnerships.

The real test, of course, is how developers will react to Code Assist and how useful its suggestions are to them. Google is making the right moves here by supporting a variety of code repositories and offering a massive context window, but if the latency is too high or the results simply aren’t that good, none of those features matter. And if it’s not significantly better than Copilot, which had quite a headstart, it may end up suffering the fate of AWS’ CodeWhisperer, which seems to have close to zero momentum.

It’s worth noting that in addition to Code Assist, Google today also announced the launch of CodeGemma, a new open model in its Gemma family that was fine-tuned for code generation and assistance. CodeGemma is now available through Vertex AI.

Image Credits: Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch

Cloud Assist

In addition to Code Assist, Google also today announced Gemini Cloud Assist to help “cloud teams design, operate, and optimize their application lifecycle.” The tool can generate architecture configuration that are tailored to a company’s needs, for example, based on a description of the desired design outcome. It can also help diagnose issues and find their root causes, as well as optimize a company’s cloud usage to reduce cost or improve performance.

Cloud Assist will be available through a chat interface and embedded directly into a number of Google Cloud products.

Google brings Stack Overflow’s knowledge base to Gemini for Google Cloud

GitHub’s Copilot Enterprise is now generally available at $39 a month

Amazon launches CodeWhisperer, a GitHub Copilot-like AI pair programming tool


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Meta's X competitor Threads invites developers to sign up for API access, publishes docs | TechCrunch

April 17, 2024 1:43 AM0


After opening its developer API to select companies for testing in March, Meta’s Twitter/X competitor Threads is now introducing developer documentation and a sign-up sheet for interested parties ahead of the API’s public launch, planned for June.

The new documentation details the API’s current limitations and its endpoints, among other things, which could help developers get started on their Threads-connected apps and any other projects that integrate with the new social network.

For instance, those who want to track analytics around Threads’ posts can use an Insights API to retrieve things like views, likes, replies, reposts, and quotes. There are also details on how to publish posts and media via the API, retrieve replies, and a series of troubleshooting tips.

The documentation indicates that Threads accounts are limited to 250 API-published posts within a 24-hour period and 1,000 replies — a measure to counteract spam or other excessive use. It also offers the image and video specifications for media uploaded with users’ posts and notes that Threads’ text post character counts have a hard limit of 500 characters — longer than old Twitter’s 280 characters, but far less than the 25,000 characters X offers to paid subscribers or the now 100,000 characters it permits in articles posted directly to its platform.

Whether or not Meta will ultimately favor certain kinds of apps over others remains to be seen.

So far, Threads API beta testers have included social tool makers like Sprinklr, Sprout Social, Social News Desk, Hootsuite, and tech news board Techmeme.

Although Threads has begun its integration with the wider fediverse — the network of interconnected social networking services that includes Mastodon and others — it doesn’t appear that fediverse sharing can be enabled or disabled through the API itself. Instead, users still have to visit their settings in the Threads app to publish to the fediverse.

Meta says the new documentation will be updated over time as it gathers feedback from developers. In addition, anyone interested in building with the new API and providing feedback can now request access via a sign-up page — something that could also help Meta track the apps that are preparing to go live alongside the API’s public launch.


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The AltStore, an alternative app store coming to the EU, will offer Patreon-backed apps | TechCrunch

April 12, 2024 3:45 PM0


Apple’s chokehold on the App Store ecosystem for iPhone apps stifles competition, according to the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), so it’s now forcing the tech giant to open up to new rivals. As a result, we’re beginning to see what an app store ecosystem could look like when other developers are allowed to compete with the default iPhone App Store.

One notable case in point is the AltStore, an alternative app store that’s preparing to take advantage of the DMA to launch an updated version of its app marketplace in the EU, with plans to support Patreon-backed apps.

To comply with the new European law, Apple is introducing APIs and frameworks that allow developers to distribute apps independently of the App Store. The AltStore was quick to capitalize on this possibility, and last week, AltStore developer Riley Testut shared screenshots of the up-and-coming version of his app store that will be offered in the EU.

Instead of relying only on ads, paid downloads or in-app purchases to monetize, the AltStore will allow developers to use its custom Patreon integration to market their apps directly to consumers.

 

Post by @rileytestut
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The store — which has offered sideloading apps like the video game emulator Delta, also from Testut — will initially launch in the EU with just two apps, the developer says. Delta will be available for free and the AltStore’s own clipboard manager Clip will require a pledge of $1 or more on the crowdfunding platform Patreon. The AltStore plans to add the beta versions of both Delta and Clip soon after, which will require a $3 per month Patreon pledge to use.

This unique business model for monetizing apps is similar in some ways to Apple’s in-app subscriptions but comes without the traditional 15% to 30% commission on sales that the tech giant currently takes. With Apple’s DMA rules, alternative app stores can opt to pay €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold — a new scheme to tap into the revenue of larger apps, which Apple calls its Core Technology Fee. (Whether Apple’s fee will remain is uncertain, as the EU is investigating the tech giant for non-compliance with its competition law.)

As Testut explains, after the AltStore launches and is working properly, the plan is to then allow other developers to also distribute their apps through the storefront by establishing their own sources.

“They’ll also be able to use the same Patreon integration we use to distribute ‘paid’ apps,” Testut told TechCrunch. This integration will create a new business model for apps that wouldn’t be permitted without the DMA coming into effect.

“One thing @altstore does that should really get you thinking about alternative payment systems that Apple never would have considered: it has Patreon integration, and can tie access to apps to your Patreon pledge — which gives you an entirely different, personal relationship with your users, and lets you use the same reward system you use for videos, blog posts, merch, etc,” wrote iOS developer Steve Troughton-Smith in a post on Mastodon. “Alternative app stores don’t just have to recreate Apple’s model,” he added.

Plus, he pointed out how the AltStore will provide users with a “granular view” of the entitlements — or extra permissions — that an app has, before you install it.

Beyond offering developers a new way to make money, Testus claims that the EU version of the AltStore will be “dramatically simpler” to use compared with the current version.

Today, users who want to sideload apps via the AltStore without jailbreaking their iPhone have to use a Mac or PC, provide the AltStore with their Apple ID and password, and then refresh the apps every seven days. That process not only raises security concerns, but is also complex. However, the EU version of AltStore won’t require these steps.

“It all works virtually the same as the App Store now,” Testut says.

In the screenshots he shared, the AltStore looks much like a modern-day app store, with categories like Games, Lifestyle and Utilities, as well as buttons to download its free apps, as on Apple’s App Store. However, the user interface will be slightly different, as Apple requires developers to insert an additional confirmation screen after the user clicks to install an app. This screen warns consumers that updates and purchases will be managed by the AltStore, as opposed to Apple.

Testut also notes that the AltStore apps have to be notarized by Apple in order to be installed, so it won’t be able to install just any sideloaded app available as an .ipa file.

The new AltStore is ready to launch now, but Testut says he’s waiting on final approval from Apple.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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