14 DAY TRIAL // A Russian developer who doesn’t seem to mind ripping off Apple’s Mac App Store interface has created HackStore, an alternative to those who believe Apple is restricting their rights to have anything they want installed on their Mac.
Before anything, we must stress that Apple’s App Store rules are stringent for a reason, or several reasons, many of which involve the security of your Macintosh computer.
That’s not to say Apple is always right to reject a developer’s application from its Mac App Store, which is where solutions like HackStore come into play and provide their value.
It’s to early to assess the quality of the service, or its legality for that matter, but HackStore does seem to pose quite a few real benefits.
Andrey Fedotov promotes his brainchild with the following statement: “This program for us is the epitome of Cydia for iOS, but on a Mac OS. This means that in our app will be applications and tweaks for Mac OS, which is not in the Mac AppStore, or for any reason they have not posted there.”
Fedotov believes “the biggest Mac Appstore problem is that they limit their users in everything, without giving an opportunity to expand these limits.”
Fedotov says: “This is not correct, because ONLY users should decide which applications they should install and which one[s] do not.”
Any security researcher will tell you that it’s better to have a curated app store to download apps from, than to roam free on all types of sites downloading every package that gets served to you.
To his credit, Fedotov has instated a motto that states: "No piracy apps here, forever and ever."
HackStore is teeming with software applications from any source you can think of, including Apple’s own Mac App Store. The program is also chock full of bugs, so don’t expect a flawless experience until the second or third release.
In the meantime, you can use the comments to tell us what you think about the service.