Apple Updates App Store Guidelines to Permit Game Emulators, EU Music App Links

And if you're going to the effort of using a separate controller, you might as well use a separate gaming device.

I may be wrong about the bundling in terms of the collection, but I still think this is more about Apple's general stance on "stores within an app", and the rule change is folding retro game emulators in as another exception to that, and not a change primarily about emulator allowability in general.

JIT compilers are one of few use cases where an application absolutely needs the ability to write data to memory, mark that memory region as executable, and then execute the op codes in that memory region. On iOS, other than Safari, no application, either built in or installed via the App Store is allowed to change memory permissions from writable to executable, and that acts as a cornerstone in iOS application sandboxing.

Now there’s perfectly good argument that the security argument doesn’t really stack up anymore, given that sandboxing technologies have progressed a lot, and it should be possible to properly sandbox a JIT compiler or similar. But there’s no denying the fact that removing the ability for an application to execute arbitrary created op codes is a very good way to completely eradication a huge surface area for exploits. Especially when such restrictions are paired with static scanning of binaries before signing (which happens when any binary is produced for iOS, via Apples signing service).

All of that is to say, there is a possible world where ROM are transpiled for iOS devices (using something like Rosetta), and loaded as signed binaries via emulation wrappers. But at point you’re basically having to create your own App Store, and sign a new app for each transpiled ROM.

In short, it doesn’t seem likely we’ll see JIT powered emulators on iOS anytime soon, and, at least in this specific instance, Apple has a legitimate security reason for restricting their usage.

Basically impossible.

https://andrewkelley.me/post/jamulator.html

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_PC

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.

https://folium.emuplace.app/changelogs

- hardware to dump your own cartridges is available and doesn’t require breaking copy protection (which at that point was more around locking out publishers that didn’t sign license agreements rather than unauthorized duplication), and popular older systems are fairly well understood at the interconnect level at this point

- PSX games themselves don’t use encryption to protect games, just some chicanery around CD standards so burners of the era wouldn’t make unauthorized duplication as much of an issue; additionally, the Bleem! case officially recognizes PSX emulation as legal

Once you get to the PS2/GameCube/Xbox generation, you start to run into systems that include encrypted executables that make DMCA-compliant emulators basically impossible.

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.

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.

You can. You just add her to TestFlight and renew the app every 3 months.

Not everyone is interested in making money.

Because it's half of the market, and more depending on who you're targeting.

I worked at a shop where we were asked for Blackberry apps alongside with iOS and android apps, not because they had strong feelings about BlackBerry, but because it was 3% of their market share and it was above their cutoff for support.

  because they developed the tools and technologies that made their OS

Right now there is simply no way to know whether people are interested in the AppStore itself or simply selling to people who own iPhones (which is more likely but I may be wrong).

If I were a high class furniture company and the developer building roughly half of the populations' homes could enforce that all furniture sold to their customers needs to be vetted and distributed by them, of course I would play by their rules and even sing their praise.

Apples terms (all of them) are a direct result of their ability to stifle any competition on devices their customers paid them good money for.

Nothing they do is problematic unless they are able to "my way or the highway" their rules on the hardware level.

Apple dug too deeply and greedily and they woke up the sleeping regulatory giants which are now changing the rules.

Hey if those tools and technologies on the Apple App Store are so valuable, then Apple has nothing to worry about. Developers will just stay on that app store.

If, instead, other competing options are better on some metrics than Apple's, then that is a situation where developers would move off of the app store.

It seems like we will find out how valuable that app store really is soon, won't we?

Nah. It's because developers put a lot of effort in making Apple's platform great for many users.

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.

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.