Unable to Launch SideStore? Try These 5 Easy Fixes!

SideStore, as the name suggests, is a third-party, untethered alternate app marketplace or “App Store” that allows you to sideload apps onto your iPhone or iPad. The service essentially enables you to circumvent certain restrictions and app distribution limitations set by Apple’s Developer Program.

This section will list all possible steps to take to identify and subsequently resolve the issue with SideStore not launching. Make sure to proceed stepwise and follow all possible recommendations until the app opens without crashing.

1) Close and Reopen SideStore

If any app on your iPhone is buggy, laggy, unresponsive, or starts crashing, try closing it from your recent apps. In the context of SideStore, particularly if you’ve correctly installed the app and have been using it for a long time, it’s likely that the issue lies within your device.

To close any app on your iPhone:

1. Swipe up to the Home Screen.
2. From the Home Screen, swipe up from the bottom of the screen, pausing in the middle.
3. Swipe right or left to find SideStore within your recent apps (even if it crashes, you’ll still see the app in your Recents).
4. Swipe up on the preview (which most likely would be a blank screen) to close the app.

2) Restart Your iPhone

If SideStore isn’t responding or fails to open, try restarting your iPhone. This method should be used as a basic troubleshooting step for all issues, as it can sometimes solve problems that are otherwise hard to explain.

To restart your iPhone:

1. Press and hold either of the two volume buttons on the left side and the power button on the right side.
2. When the power-off slider appears, release these buttons and drag the slider to the right to power off your device.
3. If your iPhone is completely unresponsive, force restart it by pressing and releasing the volume up and then volume down buttons, followed by holding the power button on the right side.
4. To power your device back on, hold the power button on the right side until the Apple logo appears.

Since SideStore is used to sideload apps from within the app, it can easily consume a huge chunk of your device’s storage—sometimes even more than 10GB. This can reduce the free storage space on your iPhone to the bare minimum. When this happens, the phone will try to compensate and will slow down.

To resolve this issue, it’s advisable to offload (not uninstall) SideStore. The reason for doing this is that iOS and iPadOS don’t have a dedicated option to clear app data like Android does. Offloading the app keeps the app data but removes the app itself. You can then reinstall the app, which will be comparatively lighter and consume fewer resources than before.

It’s important to note that while this will free up some storage space, you may need to sideload some of the already installed apps again on your device. To offload an app on iOS:

1. Open your phone’s Settings.
2. Go to General > iPhone Storage.
3. Scroll down and tap on SideStore or the app you want to offload (we’ll be using WhatsApp as an example for this guide).
4. Tap “Offload App.”

4) Check for Proper Installation Procedures

Users who have recently installed SideStore are aware that the service itself has to be sideloaded onto their device via an external PC. The process can be a bit tedious, especially for Windows users. For this reason, it’s possible that the correct installation procedures aren’t followed.

One error relevant to the situation is that SideStore does not refresh right after installation. While the app displays a 7-day expiry period, a bug causing early expiry will prevent you from opening the app altogether. This happens because SideStore itself operates on a temporary license certificate that needs to be refreshed periodically.

To fix this, refresh the app immediately after installing SideStore. The developers have mentioned plans for a future update that will automatically update and refresh the app, but this must be done manually for now.

5) Manually Refresh SideStore

If SideStore fails to launch or crashes, the most reliable solution is to refresh the app itself. You will generally find the option to do this within the app. However, for most users, all apps except SideStore refresh normally.

The solution to this issue is to find a newer version of SideStore in the .ipa format. You can usually do this by joining the company’s Discord server. From there, install the IPA file as you would for any other app, and voilà, SideStore will refresh itself.

↪ What if it Doesn’t Work?

In many scenarios, SideStore might fail to update. More often than not, the issue here is tied to the app’s pairing file, which needs to be refreshed.

To refresh the pairing file:

1. Open SideStore and go to Settings.
2. Under the Debug section, look for the option “Reset pairing file.”
3. Download Jitterbug from GitHub onto your PC.
4. Connect your iPhone or iPad to the PC and run jitterbug.exe. A prompt will pop up on the phone asking for trust permissions.
5. Re-run jitterbug.exe, and it will create a new pairing file.

SideStore is riddled with various bugs and glitches, which can start to surface as new versions of iOS or iPadOS are released. Nevertheless, addressing the issues requires a bit of technical know-how to troubleshoot. This guide has listed all the necessary steps to ensure that issues with the app not launching are identified and subsequently resolved.