After initially keeping it proprietary from its inception in 2004, in late 2011 Apple made the codec available open source and royalty-free.

According to Apple, audio files compressed with its lossless codec will use up "about half the storage space" that the uncompressed data would require.

[3][4] ALAC has been measured to require around four times as much CPU power to decode than FLAC does,[5] with implications for battery life on limited-power devices.

On March 5, 2005, Hammerton published a simple open source decoder written in the C programming language on the basis of the work.

[9] The Apple Lossless Encoder (and decoder) were released as open source software under the Apache License version 2.0 on October 27, 2011.