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Apple Updates App Store Guidelines to Permit Game Emulators, EU Music App Links
- talldayo 3y agoBetter late than never...? Watching this all get walked back is kinda surreal, makes you wonder what the actual precedent was for keeping them off the App Store in the first place. There really shouldn't be that many hoops to running GBA4iOS on hardware you paid for.
- kccqzy 3y agoThe actual reason was that Apple wants to encourage native development instead of targeting some other platform and then emulating or simulating that on iOS. At one point they even required all iOS apps to be written in only C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++, JavaScript and no other languages. They walked that back almost immediately.
- withinboredom 3y agoI vaguely remember this as well, but that wasn't the only reason. The other reason was security/ability to review apps. If an app can run arbitrary code, then they don't know if it contains a virus or something else to escape the sandbox. Or something like that. This was all quite a long time ago and Google isn't being super helpful in searching for old posts.
- ben_w 3y agoThat rings a bell for me too, FWIW.
- simion314 3y agoI bet it is not about the viruses, Apple does a bad job at catching malware. They are very concerned if a developer might show some link that would educate an apple user that they can get discounts outside the App Store so it is clear that all was for the money. If you have an emulator and then say get some old game from Gog and play it then Apple does not get their 15-30% cut, they want you to buy a game from their store instead.
- withinboredom 3y agoOh, no doubt this is ALL about money. I was just recalling the "official" reason.
- NekkoDroid 3y ago> They are very concerned if a developer might show some link that would educate an apple user that they can get discounts outside the App Store I recently had a friend ask if I wanna join their YT Premium Family plan and they said it would be like 6 euro for me. Ended up asking how much they are paying as a whole and it was 32 per month and I immediatly knew that it was paid for on an iPad/iPhone, cuz even if you just go on the website on one of the devices it will show you the actual price of 24 euro.
- Mathnerd314 3y agoHere is an example removal (2021): https://www.imore.com/apple-going-remove-idos-2-emulator-app-store-get-it-while-you-can https://www.imore.com/apple-going-remove-idos-2-emulator-app... It seems that they considered loading game images as "running executable code". So in particular what was banned was running code downloaded remotely, meaning any emulator that could download game images from the web or load game images from the filesystem was banned.
- talldayo 3y agoWell that's the part that sorta confuses me. There were a lot of high-quality emulators that were native to iOS, and sideloading them was the only way to use it. There was also the same bog-standard port of Retroarch et. al., but developers really did put effort into making high quality, even Open Source, iOS-native emulation software. The sinister side of me wants to say that stopping emulation forces more users down the IAP/microtransaction feedback loop in order to entertain themselves. The rational side of me wants to say that Yoshi's Cookie isn't the Fortnite killer, but the whole thing feels icky to me nevertheless.
- jwells89 3y agoI think they wanted to somewhat replicate what they had on macOS, where the best and most popular apps were those built by indie/boutique dev houses that cared specifically about building great iOS apps. Lowest common denominator apps that treated iOS as a generic mobile target (and thus, ignoring platform conventions and such) were undesired. I’m not sure that ever could’ve happened given the popularity of iOS, though. Companies like Panic and Omni Group don’t have the sort of firepower it takes to compete against the sheer amount of money poured into marketing by Facebook, Google, VC-backed startups, etc.
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- modeless 3y agoYeah, funny how the threat of actual competition (even crippled as it is) promotes user-friendly policy changes. Imagine that. I think the reason was that Apple didn't want to get sued by Nintendo. They use the same locked down platform strategy as consoles so it would look bad if they were complicit in circumventing other platforms' restrictions. Still a lame reason. I definitely expect some litigation related to emulators on the app store though.
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- doublerabbit 3y agoSo what, we're now back to 2018 when emulators were all the hype? Cool. Err, why am I flagged from this thread? - I mean seriously cool. 2018 was the hype when emulators were the thing. It's great to see such.
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- ben_w 3y ago2018? I missed that wave. I seem to remember they were cool in the late 2000s or so? Perhaps that was just me…
- amlib 3y agoi remember emulators really getting popular as a means to play the original pokemon games without owning a gameboy back in the late 90s...
- Apocryphon 3y agoYeah, Bleem! was around since 1999.
- MBCook 3y agoWhen was UltraHLE? Like ‘98?
- oneplane 3y agoI think it might be around the same time as the RetroPie wave when it got much more publicity than the early days around 2013, probably somewhere between the release of the Pi 3B and Pi 4B (2018-ish?). Around that time it was mostly N64, SNES, GB, GBA etc. Maybe even some PS1, but mostly just titles that were plausibly playable on a smaller screen or with lower resource consumption. Wouldn't be surprised if it gets attention on iOS when there is a larger public mindshare around such a topic.
- wiseowise 3y ago[flagged]
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- thih9 3y agoHave any emulator apps been published and approved already?
- internetter 3y agoApp store review isn't that fast
- rezonant 3y agoWe've been waiting since holidays last year for one of our updates to be reviewed.
- RedComet 3y agoThe use of "retro" is interesting. Probably intended to exclude Switch emulators, but what will the cutoff be?
- goryramsy 3y agoThere are Switch emulators for iOS [0] [0] https://github.com/emuPlace/Sudachi https://github.com/emuPlace/Sudachi
- jsheard 3y agoThey may exist, but the implication is they won't be allowed on the App Store.
- goryramsy 3y agoAll depending on an ambiguous ’Retro’ requirement. Would an out of production device be ‘retro’? If so, then Switch 2’s ~2025 upcoming release would retro-ify many games. I guess we’ll see soon based on what passes app review.
- goryramsy 3y agoForgot about Folium. https://folium.emuplace.app/changelogs https://folium.emuplace.app/changelogs
- duskwuff 3y agoRealistically, the cutoff is likely to be "can you point to a legitimate source of ROMs". There's enough fan games for some older consoles like Atari 2600 or NES that this might be possible, but it certainly wouldn't be possible for newer consoles like the Switch.
- willis936 3y agoIt's much easier to get your hands on a switch game and rip it with your hacked console (all perfectly legal acts) than it is to get a 20 year old artifact.
- withinboredom 3y ago> They want to use Apple's tools and technologies, distribute on the App Store , and benefit from the trust we've built with users - and pay Apple nothing for it This quote smells like a "self-induced problem" since they literally require developers to buy or rent their hardware to build an app and also (at least, previously) required developers to publish on the App Store. If I could build an iPhone app on my Windows machine and publish an app from my website, then their argument wouldn't make any sense.
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- Drakim 3y agoTo me it smells like flat out dishonesty. They are pretending the App Store is this premium high quality service that the riff-raff wants to get unfair access to, while they have actually been fighting tooth, claw, and nail to make any other alternative way of getting apps onto the iPhone physically impossible. If I wanna make an app for my mom's iPhone, I *can't* because Apple is preventing me. All while saying I'm trying to take advantage of them by wanting to get my app on the App Store. While working hard to make sure I have no other options. It's one small step removed from "stop hitting yourself" logic.
- withinboredom 3y agoFurther, they actively stifle competition on their app store. Want to launch an MVP? It's "too similar to other apps in this market."
- ben_w 3y agoWhile I doubt they're going to be good judges of similarity, in the cases where they are correct that it is too similar, you don't have the "V" part of "Viable". > “All happy companies are diferent: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition” — I may be creeped out by the guy himself, but I think Peter Thiel is right about that.
- pininja 3y agoVery excited about this! But I’ve also been impatient and started using Eclipse for all of my Gameboy emulation over the last year.. it a PWA and uses local storage for game saves. https://eclipseemu.me/ https://eclipseemu.me/
- pininja 3y agoI’ve also enjoyed using desmume for DS emulation https://github.com/44670/desmume-wasm https://github.com/44670/desmume-wasm
- speps 3y agoWhat's a revoke? Why is it a problem?
- rezonant 3y agoGuessing here, but I suspect they are referring to the revocation of the enterprise signing certificates used by gray-market iOS app stores, since native app emulators could only be distributed that way until now. It's whack-a-mole- the stores sign their executables with a new certificate, Apple finds out about it, revokes the certificate. When that happens, I imagine the software signed by that certificate will no longer run on the devices the software was installed to.
- pininja 3y agoI assume they’re referring to when the App Store revoked everyone’s emulator apps. For Apple to break these they’d probably need to remove standard web APIs.
- Pfhortune 3y agoWhen you load an app on your own iOS device with a free developer account, that app will fail to open (as in be revoked) after seven days unless you refresh it from a Mac (or Windows system with AltStore or similar).
- hn-acct 3y ago[dead]
- voytec 3y agoApple has been user-hostile on all possible fronts in their efforts to enforce renting model over media ownership. Some 10 years back iTunes had an option to stream or share media over network. It was cool to stuff iMac's 3TB HDD with audio CD rips and have all this music available on an iPhone or any other iDevice connected to the same local network. I had a VPN connection from iPhone to home network and all CD rips available anywhere. To avoid confusion: I'm talking about iTunes-specific functionality, not media files sharing. When iTunes was opened on an iMac, all iDevices in LAN automatically had all the media available through local iTunes apps. And then they "renamed" iTunes to Music... But even during the iTunes era they made it artificially difficult to own own media. One would think (or maybe I was delusional?) that media library fully synced from desktop iTunes to iPhone iTunes serves as kind of a backup. Nope - turns out that when desktop disk dies, one can't sync media from iPhone to the new desktop disk. Desktop iTunes was happy to suggest wiping iPhone media as a sync method.
- oneplane 3y agoiTunes Home Sharing and RAOP are still present and still work fine. Not sure what makes it not work for you (except the VPN connection which isn't allowed, Home Sharing is only for a single local subnet, those were the rules from the start as can be expected with the RIAA etc.). As for owning media, that was pretty easy, got a bit harder for a while and then got easy again. You can get everything you buy with no DRM and play it wherever you want for as long as you want. There are some limitations with iTunes Match AFAIK because again, recording industry/labels said no.
- WWLink 3y agoIIRC you actually could copy from the phone or ipod back to the computer but you had to turn off automatic sync first.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoCorrect.
- pipeline_peak 3y agoSteve Jobs announcing PlayStation emulator at MacWorld https://youtu.be/3OqMcqRI-xA?si=nUkGn6vLrLLMiGOP https://youtu.be/3OqMcqRI-xA?si=nUkGn6vLrLLMiGOP
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoThis is really cool. However, I think an underrated difference between then and now is that you could physically put a commercial Playstation disc into a standard CD drive and read it, no console hacking required.
- ascagnel_ 3y agoIt’s trivially easy to take that same PSX disc, make an image of it, and load that into an emulator today.
- D13Fd 3y agoThe difference is that the PSX disc had some semblance of DRM or at least indicated ownership. Most ROMs are just copied.
- pipeline_peak 3y agoThat standard usage is part of what killed the Dreamcast. Just burn an iso of Sonic and throw it in.
- rezonant 3y agoInterestingly, The Dreamcast's GD-ROM format was nonstandard enough to not be copyable with a normal CD burner, at least at first. They used CAV + cutting the disk speed in half in order to write more data (up to 1.2GB). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD-ROM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD-ROM I think what you are referring to is the fact that the Dreamcast itself didn't only read from GD-ROM- it was perfectly happy to execute code from a CD-ROM via the MIL-CD format. > The "foot in the door" came from a seemingly obscure capability of the Dreamcast to boot not from a GD-ROM but from a CD-ROM. Originally intended to add multimedia functions to music CDs, the functionality called "MIL-CD" was never used much, accounting for a mere seven karaoke applications. [1] Which meant if you were able to acquire a GD-ROM image, and you could repack it into the CD-ROM's max capacity of some 650MB, then you could burn it to disc and play it without any modification of your Dreamcast, at least once the other protections were defeated. For games that actually utilized more than a CD's worth of data, usually pirates would recompress or remove images, video files and other assets to save space. So that copy of Sonic might not behave exactly the same as a genuine copy, simply by the necessity of the format (not that I know if Sonic required this sort of rework). Fascinating post from Fabien Sanglard for this: [1] https://fabiensanglard.net/dreamcast_hacking/ https://fabiensanglard.net/dreamcast_hacking/
- crooked-v 3y agoI have to wonder if behind the scenes there was any push here from companies that put out licensed emulation collections. For example, there are a ton of different SEGA collections that are nice GUIs around various ROMs, where doing a native port would both be a ton of work and kind of defeat the point of trying to faithfully carry across the original with exactly the same quirks.
- OatmealDome 3y agoNotably, Apple still does not allow non web browsing apps to use JIT recompilers. This precludes emulators for 6th generation and newer consoles (GameCube, etc) from running on the platform even with this guideline change. I submitted a DMA interoperability request for JIT recompilers, but Apple denied it on the grounds that it doesn't fall under Article 6(7) for "multiple reasons", including that JIT is only used by web browsers on iOS.
- hnlmorg 3y agoEarlier than the GameCube even. The N64 audio was a programmable chipset (it’s late in my timezone so please forgive me for not including the full technical details here)
- VHRanger 3y agoLuckily for us both the Nintendo switch and the iPhone run ARM64, so you don't need a JIT to run yuzu/ryujinx on a phone! The bad news is that yuzus team is disbanded and never got the moltenVK backend done. And Ryujinx never got theirs to work on a phone.
- comex 3y agoThat doesn't really help unless you bundle the game code inside the app executable. Otherwise you still need a JIT entitlement in order to map code as executable.
- apatheticonion 3y agoI'm not an expert in emulation but I am curious if one could recompile ROMs AOT such that JIT is not required by the emulator? Say, statically recompile the ROM on your PC then move the emulator-specific binary to the iOS device. Would such an approach be permissible by Apple? Is it possible to do so while sharing the source code for the JIT layer? I suppose the binary format must itself be natively compatible by iOS otherwise you'd need to have a JIT layer for your binary format - right?
- wmf 3y ago
- pridkett 3y agoSome of us remember back in 1999 when Steve Jobs announced that Connectix, a PSX emulator was coming to Macs. Different times, man. Luckily, YouTube doesn’t forget. https://youtu.be/3OqMcqRI-xA?si=lC2tbRWS-2UGe_8G https://youtu.be/3OqMcqRI-xA?si=lC2tbRWS-2UGe_8G
- throwaway48476 3y agoYoutube "forgets" a lot. My history has more deleted videos than not.
- sgerenser 3y agoConnectix was the company (known previously for making the QuickCam, the first webcam for Mac), Virtual GameStation was their PSX emulator.
- jwells89 3y agoAlso the company behind Virtual PC[0], which at the time was the most capable emulator for running DOS, Windows, and other x86 operating systems on PowerPC Macs. They sold Virtual PC to Microsoft and dissolved in 2003. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_PC
- mproud 3y agoThere are some great retrospectives on Connectix, I encourage you to find them on YouTube.
- pridkett 3y agoThanks! I remembered the announcement but not the fine grained details. Mac was a very different world in the late 90s.
- musicale 3y agoConnectix actually won a potentially important (though pyrrhic) victory against Sony: "Video game emulation advocates have asserted that Sony vs. Connectix established the legality of emulators within the United States" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_Inc._v._Connectix_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_I....
- retskrad 3y agoWe need EU to force Apple to accept alternative browser engines on iOS. The iPad desperately needs desktop Chrome to become useful.
- threeseed 3y ago[flagged]
- miohtama 3y agoI will run Firefox with uBlock on mobile. I hope many others will as well.
- threeseed 3y agoFirefox has about 3% market share on desktop and declining each year. And there are plenty of ad blockers on iOS.
- sangeeth96 3y agoYes but almost all shackled by Apple. Orion Browser is probably the only one I've come across that lets me install uBlock and it actually seems to work. None of the other ad-blocking extensions for Safari have the same power as uBlock as per my understanding and usage.
- InvaderFizz 3y agoI use AdGuard Pro on iOS Safari. I generally never see ads. The experience is pretty close to ublock origin on the desktop.
- hu3 3y ago$10 closed source app that monitors everything in my browser. Hard pass. Classic Apple swamp garden where users have to buy black box apps that are often free and open source in other platforms.
- DrNosferatu 3y agoBy not allowing me to run the full gamut of emulators - on the hardware I own - Apple is depriving me of my rights as an EU citizen.
- aeyes 3y agoYou can run whatever you want if you sideload it, even apps with a JIT compiler. This is about offering apps in the app store.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago> even apps with a JIT compiler No you can't. Altstore does this with a hack, it enables remote debugging, which requires you to be on the same wifi network as the server.
- jeff_tyrrill 3y agoThe emulator change is a minor rule change about bundling and is not what many of the reactions to the change think. What people seem to think this means: Open-ended retro game emulators like Snes9x and Dolphin are now allowed. (I don't think this is correct.) What the change is actually doing: If you are the licensed publisher of a retro game collection, you can now offer them in one app (including perhaps downloading additional games added to the collection later) instead of splitting them into individual apps. Each game must be individually vouched for.[1] What is not changing: "Emulators" have long been allowed if the emulated code is bundled with the app and it is officially licensed. [1] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ "4.7 [...] You are responsible for all such software offered in your app, including ensuring that such software complies with these Guidelines and all applicable laws. [...]" and "4.7.4 You must provide an index of software and metadata available in your app. It must include universal links that lead to all of the software offered in your app."
- al_borland 3y agoMy knee jerk reaction is to be disappointed by this, but I had an NES emulator on my first gen jailbroken iPhone back in 2007 or 2008. It was cool for a few days, but ultimately, I didn’t use it.
- bluescrn 3y agoYeah, there's not much point bothering if you're limited to a touchscreen And if you're going to the effort of using a separate controller, you might as well use a separate gaming device.
- throwaway48476 3y agoThere are controllers that integrate your phone and using your phone makes financial sense and reduces the hassle of having to carry a separate device.
- 3y ago
- resource_waste 3y agoCool! I welcome the blue bubbles to my typical airplane ride for the last 12 years. I remember having a work iphone and bringing an old motorola smartphone on the plane just so I could play Zelda OOT.
- wjq 3y agoThis is a great change coming from Apple. I was initially surprised by this considering how Apple usually dislikes it when you want to find a way to run your own binaries on iOS devices.
- devinprater 3y agoAnother use for emulators is accessibility. Using OCR, or iOS' image and screen recognition, I can more easily understand what's going on in a game. For example, since I am blind, I cannot see game menus, so in games which I can play, like Mortal Kombat, or the original Dissidia Final Fantasy. There are also games like Blazblue, which are mostly voiced visual novels, but with text describing what the characters do. So, OCR works great for that. I just hate the Blazblue character select screen, since it's a selection wheel you have to turn, and it doesn't just snap to a single character either, oh no. You have to turn it until you get to one, and then it has to be exactly on that one point. But that's okay. My point is, if I didn't have emulation on a computer or device that has OCR and such, I wouldn't know much about the games I do play. Even tutorial messages are text, so in many cases I wouldn't even know how to play the game, especially in more complex fighting games like Dissidia Final Fantasy. So, running games on the one portable device I do have with accessibility, my iPhone, would honestly be great. And the DS has a few fighting games at least, so thanks to the person that shared that. Now we just need PSP! And PS1 does have MK, and Soul Blade, so that'll be really fun!