A New Chapter for AltStore

Happy February y’all!

I have some exciting news: starting today I’m bringing on my best friend Shane Gill to handle the business side of AltStore. I realized a few months ago that I simply couldn’t continue running AltStore by myself; as the business grew, I was spending more and more time keeping everything afloat and less time actually building & improving the product. However, I knew whoever I brought on would need to fully understand the business inside-and-out in order for me to trust them…and that pretty much left just one person.

Shane has been helping me behind the scenes since before AltStore was even a thing — he was the one who originally convinced me to make this Patreon to fund Delta and AltStore development — and he’s also helped me come up with many of my workarounds necessary for AltStore to work. In other words, without Shane’s help I never could’ve turned AltStore into my full-time job, so it’s only fitting that he now officially joins the AltStore team.

Moving forward, Shane will officially be in charge of everything non-coding related, which includes:

-   Handling support

-   Outreach (with other developers + press)

-   Managing finances

-   Testing AltStore/AltServer/Delta/AltJIT on each new iOS/macOS beta

This will free up my schedule considerably, allowing me to spend virtually all my time programming — which will directly translate to more betas, more frequently 🎉

However…this is just step 1 in our master plan for world domination 😉 The REAL big news is: Shane and I are planning to move to Auckland, New Zealand, where we can buckle down and work full time on AltStore with minimal distractions. I’m currently running AltStore from my bedroom in LA, which is…far from ideal, and has made it especially hard to balance the immense AltStore workload with my regular social life. Now that Shane is on board, we’ve decided to put AltStore first and move somewhere that would allow us to work crazy startup hours without feeling social FOMO — and since I’m a New Zealand citizen, it just seemed to make the most sense to return home 🇳🇿

We’re planning to move to NZ as soon as they reopen their borders, but in the meantime we’ll continue doing our best to run AltStore from our shared LA apartment. On that note though, I apologize for the lack of updates this past month; priority has been getting things ready for Shane so he can hit the ground running, which means I haven’t had as much time to actually code. That being said, we’re now both kicking it into high gear to rapidly make progress on our current priorities, which are:

1.  Finish up AltJIT + AltServer 1.5 for public release

2.  Initial iPad support for Delta

Finally, thanks as always for your patience with me as I adjust to this new structure. I’ve really been struggling lately to make forward progress while also managing the business as a whole, but with Shane's help I'm excited to once again move quickly. I also could not keep up the motivation to work on AltStore without all of your awesome support, so thank you from the bottom of my heart for making this a reality 💜

P.S. Make sure to follow Shane on Twitter (@shanegillio) to stay up-to-date with everything happening behind the scenes!