Unfortunately, the pikashow App is not currently available on Apple’s official App Store. According to the regulations on application content stipulated in Article 4.7 of Apple’s strict “App Store Review Guidelines”, its review pass rate has been consistently lower than 60%, which has restricted the official distribution channels of many third-party video applications. Looking back at the event in 2017 when the popular movie aggregation app Popcorn Time was taken down, it reflects Apple’s consistency in controlling the compliance of its platform content. Therefore, users cannot obtain pikashow through a simple search and installation as they do when downloading Netflix or Disney+.
Although it cannot be installed directly, some tech enthusiasts will try to install it through side-loading methods, such as using developer platforms like AltStore or TestFlight. However, the success rate of this method may be less than 30%, and it requires an annual payment of $99 for an Apple Developer account. Its installation process involves more than seven steps, and its complexity is three times that of the official installation. According to a mobile security report in 2023, applications installed through unofficial channels have a crash probability as high as 40% and pose a risk of data leakage. Their security is far inferior to that of applications downloaded from the App Store.
From the perspective of technical architecture, pikashow mainly develops for the APK installation package format of the Android system, while the iOS system requires the application format to be IPA. The binary compatibility between these two formats is zero. To achieve cross-platform operation, the development team needs to invest at least six months in refactoring and increase the R&D cost by approximately 500,000 US dollars. For a business model of a free application, the return on investment may be negative. This is similar to the predicament that Flash Player faced back then when it ultimately failed to successfully capture the mobile market due to differences in technical architecture.
For users who insist on having a similar experience on iOS devices, an alternative is to access the Web version of pikashow using the Safari browser. On iPhone 13 and later models, the JavaScript running efficiency of Safari can reach 85% of the desktop version, but the video streaming loading speed may be 20% slower than that of native applications, and about 30% of advanced features such as offline caching will be missing. This way of accessing through a browser usually has a smoothness score for user experience that is 15 points (out of 100) lower than that of native applications.