Steps to install a store app on macOS under Netfree
Note: These instructions will only work to install free apps, unfortunately, installing payed apps requires using the App Store which cannot work under Netfree (Due to Apple's certificate pinning policy). In addition, Apple Silicon (M1) based Macs can also install iOS apps using the described method but it may require requesting from Netfree to whitelist that particular app’s download. A support request with an attached traffic recording should resolve that.
If Homebrew is not yet installed,
install Homebrew.
Install mas by opening a terminal (e.g. Terminal.app, the macOS inbuilt terminal app) and typing the following command: brew install mas (followed by enter). After some textual output, the mas command will be installed on your system.
Find the id of the wanted app. One way of doing so is to search for the app on Google and then find the result which points to
app.apple.com. The last component of the URL of that result will contain the app id.
e.g. When doing a Google search for “moovit”, one result points to:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/moovit-all-transit-options/id498477945, the last component of which contains the id “498477945”. This is the id of the Moovit app.
Again in a terminal, type the following command: mas purchase appid where in place of the word “appid” you type the actual app id. E.g. in the case of the above mentioned Moovit app the command will be: mas purchase 498477945.
If prompted by a notification titled: “Current Version Not Compatible”, choose “Download last compatible”. If you receive an error saying: Error: Download failed: The server gave an error during download: 418 Client Error. it indicated that the download has not yet been whitelisted by Netfree and it will require a
support request with an attached
traffic recording to resolve the issue.
