Are developers actually making money on third-party app stores?

Apple allowed third-party app stores for iPhones and iPads starting in the EU in 2024, along with emulator apps, but a gold rush hasn’t quite happened.

Setapp shut down earlier this year, blaming Apple’s complicated EU business rules, and even Epic Games’ mobile store, launched in August 2024, has made relatively little impact.

Other indie-style storefronts like AltStore and Skich, though, seem to be surviving just fine. Cofounders Riley Testut and Shane Gill are working on bringing AltStore to more countries after a $6m raise from Pace Capital, while Skich says it has passed 700k downloads and its site is drawing over 100k new users a month.

With both stores offering different ideas of what a third-party store should be – AltStore is more for ‘cool indie apps’ while Skich is betting entirely on games – there’s already far more choice for users.

Skich, available in the EU for iOS users, was born out of founder and CEO Sergey Budkovski’s desire to fix what the App Store lacked. “Discovery on the App Store is wrong. It’s built to surface what is already popular or what is paid-for placement, not to match a player with the game they will actually love,” he explains. “We built Skich to solve that problem.”

A big part of the bet with AltStore is that self-publishing is free, and that is giving developers more independence to experiment, says Gill. “Since many developers might just be trying something new, it’s freeing for them to know they can build their business however they want without us micromanaging their business model,” he tells us. “This is definitely working out for developers who have always had their own payment solutions, as they no longer need to pay extra fees.”

When it comes to developer payouts, Budkovski says Skich’s new partnership with Xsolla will unlock further value. “The main roadblock to our growth was finding the right payment partner,” he explains. “Most providers simply were not ready to support alternative app stores, either functionally or in terms of infrastructure. The last missing piece of a complete alt-store infrastructure was a payment partner.”

Xsolla will handle all payment operations as the merchant of record from July, and Skich will begin to onboard developers for direct distribution through Skich Store at a unified 15% commission for every partner. “That sits well below the traditional 30%,” says Budkovski.

Despite these positive statements, both Gill and Budkovski declined to reveal hard revenue figures for now, but said they may update us later this year.

Nevertheless, Budkovski sees a lot of future value in trying to solve the discovery problem. “The number of new games is growing exponentially,” he says. “AI is accelerating this further, as it significantly lowers the barrier to game creation, meaning even more titles will flood the market, making discoverability an even greater challenge…Skich’s recommendation engine is built around 280 genres and categories, roughly 14 times more than the App Store, which creates far more ways to match a player to a game…70% of the genres our users pick do not exist as categories on the App Store or Google Play, which shows clear demand for more granular discovery.”

Budkovski says this is why Skich users download about five times more games per month than they would through the App Store or Google Play, and around 50% of players go on to download at least one more game from the same developer.

AltStore’s Gill, meanwhile, has his eyes set on opening up in new markets. “We expect Brazil to be our next market in the very near future, and we anticipate significant potential for rapid growth there,” he tells us. “After that, we really think that if the US ever allows alternative marketplaces, it will be the biggest commercial potential for game devs.”

With John Ternus becoming Apple’s CEO on September 1, Gill was optimistic about further changes to the iOS ecosystem. “If Ternus were to direct Apple to publicly acknowledge how third-party stores can benefit both developers and users, that would be a monumental shift,” he adds.

“It’s not the most likely thing, but we did recently see Google say something similar, and it earned them a lot of goodwill. Apple and Ternus might see that same opportunity and want to improve their relationships with all developers by working more with third-party stores.”