Installing iOS apps on M1 devices?

[cristim]

Would it be possible to add support for installing iOS apps on M1 hardware, much like installing casks?

[carlocab]

If they're distributed like casks (e.g. pkg installers, or dmg images), then probably. If not, it'll probably require changes to brew.

If you can install them from the Mac App Store, then you might be able to use mas. (brew install mas)

[cristim]

Yes, I was only referring to the IDs and having brew store a mapping of brew-internal names corresponding to the mas IDs more or less similar to the mapping between the arbitrary brew-internal cask names and the DMG URLs

[SMillerDev]

So... Like recreating the app store on top of the app store?

[cristim]

no, just aliasing the ID to a cleaner name more consistent to the other brew package names (no special characters, spaces, etc.) and ensured to be unique within brew since the Appstore names are free-form and not guaranteed to be unique.

Probably the brew package names could be generated automatically from the AppStore package names, although that might be hard, otherwise this would need to be manually maintained (I can see how this might be hard over long term as well with hundreds of thousands of apps in the Appstore).

Under the hood it would still call mas with the same IDs, etc.

But yeah, this was just a thought, feel free to ignore this if it's so absurd.

[tjluoma]

Although this is veering off-topic, I have done a version of this for myself. I have a list of apps that I have purchased from the Mac App Store (https://mas.luo.ma) which includes the ID number. I have a script that will take a 'friendly' name, and search against that list. As long as it only finds one match, it will take the ID number, and run mas.

Of course, trying to do this for the entire Mac App Store would be a huge undertaking which I would not recommend (and mas already mas search {name} which will let you search the Mac App Store by name, and will return a list of apps, and their ID numbers). But it works well for "These are the apps that I mean when I use these {name}s."

Unfortunately, to go back to the original topic here, the items on that list are only Mac apps, not iOS apps.

[SMillerDev]

and mas already mas search {name} which will let you search the Mac App Store by name, and will return a list of apps, and their ID numbers

There's also mas lucky {term} iirc, which will install the first match.

[SMillerDev]

Since they are only installable through the app store (as far as I know) you can use mas. Unfortunately there is no other way.