appinst (App Installer) - Changelog

2.0: 2022/12/20

Switched to using libzip to handle IPA extraction — thanks, ViRb3! This allows appinst to better handle some larger IPA files, as the previous implementation using the now-unmaintained ZipZap framework would sometimes cause a crash in this situation.

Added some informative user-facing status information on iOS versions that use MobileInstallation. (※ iOS 5 〜 7)

Reworded and improved user-facing messages.

Made major changes to how appinst creates and handles temporary staging directories and app installation session IDs.

Added proper handling for some potential edge cases involving running multiple appinst instances. (※ I do not recommend doing this. iOS can only install one app at a time anyway, so running multiple instances of appinst will merely add to the iOS app installation queue.)

Added some error handling code to prevent appinst from theoretically potentially failing if two instances are launched in very quick succession.

If the IPA fails to be copied to the temporary staging directory, appinst will now show suggest the user to check if they've run out of disk space, as that is the most likely cause of failure.

Improved appinst's help message (accessible via the -h or --help arguments, or if appinst is run without any arguments specified)

Removed the unnecessary arm64e Mach-O arch slice from the appinst binary.

appinst will now always ensure that proper filesystem ownership and permissions are set on its temporary directory in order to prevent any possibility of an app installation failure if appinst was recently previously run as root. (That being said, this is rendered somewhat redundant by the other improvements in 2.0…)

appinst will now always proactively clean up its temporary directory after an installation attempt, unlike previous versions which relied on iOS behaviour.

Changed package ID to ai.akemi.appinst.

1.1.4: 2021/02/11

Various improvements were made to appinst's output.

Fixed a crash that would sometimes occur on iOS 5.

1.1.3: 2019/05/27

Added compatibility with arm64e SoCs (A12/A12X).

Updated URLs where relevant to reflect my new domain (akemi.ai).

1.1.2: 2018/07/23

Fixed an issue on iOS 5 where appinst would not work at all due to an undocumented change in Theos causing default deployment target to be set incorrectly, thus generating binaries that could not be properly run on iOS 5.

1.1.1: 2018/06/21

Confirmed compatibility with all supported iOS versions up to iOS 11.3.1.

1.1: 2018/02/26

Added compatibility with iOS 11.

1.0: 2017/09/21

Refactored many parts of appinst's code and removed many things that are no longer in use.

0.4-asu-1: 2017/08/01

Fixed an edge case where appinst may crash upon installing certain types of IPAs.

0.2-asu-1: 2014/11/13

Initial release.