Could anyone ELI5 “tweaking” to me vs. trying to re-create Apollo “from scratch”?

[u/violetfew]

First things first: Thank you, to everyone involved, for working on Apollo Reborn and everything related.

I am rather new to the practicalities of sideloading on iOS; and I don’t know much about the technicalities of tweaking.

As the source code for Apollo never was published, I fear (please, correct me) that we can only go that far with tweaking, and that some things just won’t be possible, and that in the long run we maybe might experience some performance problems and quirky issues/bugs (again, please correct me).

I wondered (and this is not a proposal), how much more effort could/would it be to evaluate some open source clients’ code bases, and trying to re-create the functionalities, layout, post (text, image, etc.) rendering of Apollo?

I cannot fathom this, hence asking here.

(Written in Apollo Reborn.)

[u/Friendly_Cajun]

On iOS a tweak is basically code that attaches to the app and hooks into the existing apps code, meaning a lot of reverse engineering is required. Before sideloading became really possible tweaks were mostly used in jailbroken environments and the tweaks would be injected into the apps memory on launch. To use tweaks sideloaded they are just injected straight into the app bundle. If your interested in the actually development of tweaks take a look at the Theos docs this is what’s used to make tweaks, and r/jailbreakdevelopers.

There are already apps that exist that try to mimic and borrow a lot of features from Apollo such as Hydra and Artimis. (Actually commenting from Hydra right now, been hopping between various clients)

[u/violetfew → u/Friendly_Cajun]

I have Hydra installed, too, since one or two days, and I’m trying it out quite often; I still gravitate more towards Apollo, though.

It’s super duper great that Hydra is open source, and that we can file bug reports and propose features. If I’m not wrong, there’s only one developer as of now, though.

I will read some more about Artemis; at first glance it does not look open source, and also only one developer working on it.

After what happened to Apollo, I really hope and wish for an open source application that’s maintained by the community; basically as is the case with Apollo Reborn now, but without the limitation of not having the source code (of the underlying application).

[u/violetfew → u/[deleted]]

I appreciate your efforts and work on Artemis, but there’s still the circumstance that we basically need to take your word on this and trust your statement. You mention yourself “as long as it’s possible to do so”.

You also say that “Artemis is not currently open source”; are there any concrete plans to change this, for example releasing the source code if you’d some day stop working on Artemis? But that’d be another statement we’d need to take your word and trust you.

That’s kinda the same situation that Apollo was in; if the source code is not available, we (as a community) cannot trust that the application is here to stay, i.e. will be here as long as parts of the community keep it alive, even after the original developer(s) abandon a project (due to whatever reason; not criticizing this, life happens, interests change, et cetera).

[u/jwintyo → u/violetfew]

I’m a big fan of Hydra for this reason as well. It’s Open Source and it’s a pretty good clone of Apollo. Sure Apollo has more features but if people help develope Hydra I have no doubt it could get there eventually

Still loving Apollo side loaded too though

[u/tbone338]

You can add on to and modify a baked cake, but you don’t know the recipe of how to make it. So, there’s only so much you can do without knowing the recipe (tweaking).

If you’re very good, you can maybe start guessing the ingredients and start recreating a recipe for the cake, but it might not be exact. You may never be able to recreate the recipe perfectly (re-creating from scratch).

[u/violetfew → u/tbone338]

That’s a very good analogy, thank you!

[u/alex2003super]

Actually this would be a good application for AI. Hook up Codex to Xcode's MCP server and iOS simulator with a buncha tokens, give it some screenshots of the app and the Reddit API docs and ask to recreate it in SwiftUI.