Contribute

How to help preserve these apps, and how to run them yourself.

Legacy Store is a metadata-only archive: the index, analysis, and history live here, but the app binaries live on the Internet Archive. Anyone can add a missing app, and anyone with the right hardware can install what's already here.

Adding a missing app

Every greyed-out entry on this site is an app the archive knows existed but doesn't have a copy of. The most useful thing you can contribute is one of those apps: an original App Store .ipa file, uploaded to the Internet Archive so it lives somewhere durable and public.

Old .ipa files tend to survive in a few places:

• An old iTunes library. Through iTunes 12.6.x, the desktop App Store could still download apps, leaving .ipa files under iTunes Media / Mobile Applications. Many of these are the only surviving copy of an app.
• Local device backups from the era, which sometimes include the app payloads alongside their data.
• Your purchase history. Apps you bought years ago can usually be re-downloaded from your account, unless they were pulled from the App Store entirely.

To contribute one, create a free Internet Archive account and upload the .ipa, ideally noting the app name, version, and where it came from. How quickly it lands in this index depends on where it goes: files added to an item the archive already tracks are picked up automatically within about two weeks, and new items in the ipaarchive collection are discovered weekly. Uploads elsewhere on the Archive are found by a monthly sweep and reviewed before ingest — to fast-track one, open a GitHub issue with the item link.

Metadata corrections — a wrong date, a bad category, a mislabeled app — are also welcome. The project is open source; open an issue or pull request on GitHub.

Dumping and decrypting apps

Apps bought from the App Store are wrapped in Apple's FairPlay DRM, and an encrypted binary only runs under the Apple ID that bought it. That's why many copies here install but won't run — they were preserved still encrypted. The copy worth keeping is a decrypted dump, which runs anywhere. Producing one takes a jailbroken device and a decryption tool matched to its iOS version:

iOS version	Decryption tool
iPhoneOS 2	Crackulous 0.9
iPhoneOS 3	AppCrackr
iOS 4	Crackulous 1.0.0.5
iOS 5	Clutch 1.3
iOS 6–10	Clutch 2.0.4
iOS 11–15	bfdecrypt
iOS 16	TrollDecrypt (TrollStore 2)

The process is the same across eras: install the tool from Cydia (or TrollStore on modern iOS), decrypt an installed app to a .ipa, then copy it off the device with something like iFunBox or Filza. The LegacyJailbreak community's step-by-step guide covers every iOS version in detail, including tool sources, and the community runs its own archival effort you can submit to as well.

To get a specific old version of an app you once bought, ipatool can list every version Apple still keeps and download the one you name from your purchase history. It arrives encrypted, like any App Store download, and still needs decrypting to run anywhere else.

Checking what's already here first

Before you work through a stack of old .ipa files, you can ask the archive which versions it already holds a usable copy of, and only bother with the gaps. FairPlay encrypts only an app's main executable, so the plists inside every .ipa stay readable even while the binary is encrypted — a plain unzip gives you the identifiers the archive matches on. A file downloaded through iTunes also carries an iTunesMetadata.plist whose softwareVersionExternalIdentifier pins the exact App Store build, which is the most precise identifier to match on. Pass whatever a file has to the coverage endpoint — the external id alone, or a bundle id and version:

curl https://legacystore.app/api/v1/coverage?external_id=2166661
curl https://legacystore.app/api/v1/coverage/com.clickgamer.AngryBirds/1.0

It replies with a copies map counting the copies the archive holds for that version, by state — for example {"installable":37,"encrypted":2}, or {} when nothing matches. An installable count above zero means a decrypted, runnable copy already exists; anything else is worth uploading. To check a whole library at once, POST a JSON array of probes — each with any of bundle_id, app_store_id, version, or external_id — to /api/v1/coverage, and you get one result back per entry. Modified repackages never count toward these totals, so a clean dump of an app we only hold a modded copy of still reads as a gap.

The coverage endpoint is part of the site's public REST API, which also exposes the full catalog — apps, versions, archived copies, charts, reviews, and screenshots — as JSON at /api/v1. If you're building tooling around your own collection, start there.

Installing an archived app

There are two paths, depending on the app and your hardware.

If the app is in your own purchase history, the simplest route needs no computer and no jailbreak: on a period iPhone or iPad, the built-in App Store can offer to download the last version compatible with this device for anything you've previously bought. When it applies, this is the cleanest way to get a period-correct build running.

For an archived copy you didn't buy, downloaded from the Internet Archive, you'll generally need a jailbroken device running AppSync Unified, which lets iOS install unsigned .ipa files. Note that many of these copies are still FairPlay-encrypted and will install but refuse to launch — check the install status on each app's version list before downloading.

Getting an old device jailbroken

For the 32-bit devices most of this archive targets — iPhone 3G through 5c, original iPad — the main tool is Legacy iOS Kit, an open-source utility (macOS and Linux) that can restore, downgrade, save SHSH blobs, and jailbreak legacy hardware: 32-bit devices on roughly iOS 3.1.3 through 9.3.4, plus some 64-bit A7–A11 models. Its wiki walks through the jailbreak step by step; from there, AppSync Unified handles the archived .ipa files.

A few things to know: 32-bit apps won't run on iOS 11 or later, so a period app needs a period device. Sideloading tools like AltStore or Sideloadly work on newer hardware, but they re-sign apps on a seven-day clock and need a computer to renew — for the classic devices this archive serves, jailbreak plus AppSync is the durable route. And only install apps you have a right to use; the binaries are hosted by the Internet Archive, not by Legacy Store.

Preservation only works because people keep copies. If you have old devices, old backups, or an old iTunes library sitting around, there's history in there worth saving.