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Comment by troydavis | Hacker News Reader

This really is the only viable option right now, and specifically only the Apple TV. The Shield and Chromecast are slight improvements, but of the mainstream TV choices, Apple TV is literally the only product that puts your privacy first.

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And sadly, you need to trade your freedom for your privacy with AppleTV. I have a shield so that I can sideload apps like NewPipe and Kodi.

I wish AppleTV would allow side-loading apps. That would be the best of both worlds.

Apple TV does let you. You just have to reload them once a week, or factor an additional $100 into the price to only do that only once a year.

Is a there a good collection of Idevice apps somewhere that we can take and compile and use for this purpose? I am starting to go down the path of making my own simple versions of popular apps like Twitter or pulling the backend apis of other apps for stores all in an effort to remove as much tracking as I can while still keeping functionality.

For example, there is a popular convenience store app that gives discounts on items such as coffee but in addition to the standard tracking, I also discovered code that indicates they are using bluetooth beacons to do in store tracking. Instead I am pulling their api to fetch the deals so I can ditch the app. Would be great if there is an existing collection so I can ditch more official apps more easily.

https://altstore.io/ is the best known. Google "alternative app stores for ios", there are many.

(Not an endorsement; Have not used any of them myself).

Ah yes I remember AltStore when it came out. Left it on my phone for a while but all that was ever published was his emulator(which kept crashing btw). I wonder if the store has improved since.

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