iPhone Talks
There are a many cellphones that make me feel nostalgic. None of them is Android nor iPhone. Some of them are QWERTY, some are flip phones. Phones were much interesting back in the days when Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Sharp, Blackberry and more are still competitive in the market. Today’s smartphones are indifferent and rather being “boredphones”. And all of these boredness are rooted in the “iPhone Moment”.
Despite how much I dislike iPhone’s disruptive innovation and its market breakthrough as well as Apple’s philosophy behind it. There is one thing true about the spirit of Steve Jobs, that is, a phone should be comfortably used in one hand. Although this was his defense of iPhone’s 3.5 inch screen size, I strongly agree with his ergonomics minded UX design.
But people are very different individually, so there is no universal design fits perfect for everyone. I have medium sized hands and iPhone 4s (3.5") handles very comfortable for me. But due to all the apps that I use have dropped support of it, I had to switch to a larger iPhone.
iPhone SE 1st gen (4.0") is what I’ve been using since then. Its size is not as comfortable but still can be handled in most posture. This is the maxim size I could prefer for an iPhone. The later SE models (4.7") are too large, and the “mini” model (5.4") and latest SE 4th gen (6.1") look like a joke to me.
But wait! Why I have no problem with my Pixel and OnePlus? Because I treat them as PDA and Pocket PC, or in more modern term, phablet. These mobile devices are supposed to be used with both hands. Although I would consider older Nexus (prior to 5) as phones.
Back to iPhone talks. Recently I moved all my close-sourced apps to my iPhone SE and decide to leave my Android phone completely with open-source ecosystem. This leads to a purposefully designed problem, of course by Apple.
My phone use cases are very limited, no matter which OS, usually less than 10 apps are installed by me. As wrote in recent post, I heavily rely on RSS feeds to receive information, either through podcasts or news.
On Android, my favorite reader is Feeder and player is AntennaPod. They both support OPML import/export as my core needs, but neither of them is on iOS.
This is not a problem if I’m a regular user with a well-supported iPhone. But I’m clearly not. The best alternatives on iOS are Anytime Podcast Player and NetNewsWire, but I couldn’t install NetNewsWire. App Store sets it “Requires iOS 17.0 or later” even though the project’s website states “For iOS 13 and newer” (SE 1st gen stucks at iOS 15.8.3).
So, I need some justice to take back my rights and freedom to own and use my iPhone. Unfortunately, AltStore still has too much restrictions by Apple. This company is trolling the entire world too much so I have to troll it back in a much troller sense.
Jailbreak with palera1n
The installation is very simple. I choose to use ISO version since this is a one-time use tool. I just downloaded the ISO file and instead of flashing with Etcher I simply put it on a Ventoy drive.
After the ISO booted, I used 1 palera1n with Rootless option and then 1 Start. By following the instruction on screen, the phone would enter DFU mode and finish the job automatically.
When it rebooted back to normal with an extra app palera1n, playing with package managers such as Sileo and Zebra may be interesting, but this is not what I’m looking for.
Sideloadly & TrollStore
For using Sideloadly, I choose to use my Hackintosh on a ThinkPad due to hassle of Windows. Using Hackintosh is much easier nowadays thanks to OpenCore. Whatever the platform is, baremetal, virtualbox, KVM, Proxmox, or even docker is possible to run Mac OS.
After installing SideloadlySetup.dmg, I connected my iPhone via USB and it detects as expected. Then, I had to login both my iTunes and Sideloadly with same account and make it trusted developer through Settings -> General -> Profiles/VPN & Device Management in order to install TrollInstallerX.ipa.
Using TrollInstallerX to install TrollStore and it’s now ready to install all sorts of IPAs. But due to the trolling of Apple, both AppStore++ and ipatool have became unusable. The latest working tool is MuffinStore and it works like a charm.
MuffinStore
On iPhone, I used safari to download MuffinStore_v1.1.tipa and opened it with TrollStore to install the package. Open MuffinStore, I can see and up or downgrade any installed apps, but what I need is to tap the Download option.
Paste the App Store link of NetNewsWire in there, and pull the version ID list from server. I selected the latest one and I finally could make purchase of the app. It showed Download an older version of this app but this is exactly what I wanted and couldn’t get without jailbreaking.
Afterall, the installed version is NetNewsWire 6.1.4 (Build 6120). It works as expected and worth the time and effort to get.
The jailbreak process is a little bit long and not well documented. So, as a disclaimer, I decide to write this as my own record for lookup in the future. I’m not responsible for anyone else trolling Apple after reading this post. Don’t troll on me because of that.