AltStore 1.5b4 - Fixes iOS 13 crash-on-launch (Patreon)

Hi all,

First, I want to acknowledge the tragic injustice unfolding in Ukraine. As you may have seen on Twitter, Shane and I will be donating 20% of this month's Patreon earnings to the Ukrainian Red Cross to support those impacted by the war. We've also updated the AltStore News tab with a link to a resource guide listing several ways our community can help, so we recommend checking that out if you'd also like to #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦

As for today's beta, it's one I'm sure many of you will appreciate: AltStore 1.5b4 is now available which fixes AltStore crashing-on-launch on iOS 13.x and earlier ✅

If you're currently running iOS 13.x or earlier, you can manually update to this beta by re-installing AltStore with AltServer. Make sure you've updated to the latest AltServer beta (attached to this post for convenience), then choose "Install AltStore" from the AltServer menu.

⚠️ NOTE: You do NOT need to delete AltStore before re-installing it with AltServer. Deleting AltStore will also delete all backed up data for deactivated apps, which means they'll lose all data when later reactivated.

Lastly, I want to apologize for the delay releasing this fix. Based on the bug reports I received, I was pretty confident I knew what the issue was...but after an embarrassingly long time trying to fix what I assumed was broken, it turns out the issue was completely unrelated to what I was investigating 😑 tl;dr, in the previous AltStore update I started using a system framework introduced in iOS 14 (libAppleArchive). This unfortunately caused AltStore to crash on iOS versions prior to that, because AltStore couldn't locate the framework at launch time. To fix this, I've now explicitly marked that framework as "optional", which means AltStore will no longer crash if the framework can't be found: https://github.com/rileytestut/AltStore/commit/a149cb231b6cea4e866423a3591a0866f231d017

As always, thanks for your patience while we squash these frustrating bugs! Your feedback is invaluable for helping us get to the bottom of these issues, so please keeping DMing us any questions you have or bugs you encounter 🙂

- Riley