Curious, why is Roblox in violation of Apple's App store policies?
Roblox is in clear violation of this clause, downloading and executing entire games written in Lua. Apple does have an exception to this policy for HTML5 games and streaming games but Roblox does not qualify because it is not HTML5 and not streaming. Many people have had their businesses destroyed for far less serious violations of App Store policy.
I believe there are also other rules against putting an app store inside your App Store app. Clearly Roblox is an app store for games, with its own currency. Apple has not been reasonable on this point with other companies: they originally didn't even want to allow cloud game streaming apps to play multiple games in a single app. Their ridiculous plan was to require a separate Apple App Store listing for each game that a streaming platform supported, and they only relented under pressure after Microsoft went public with their complaints: https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/11/21433071/microsoft-apple-... And after that debacle they explicitly added exceptions to their policies for game streaming apps. They have never done so for Roblox-like apps, which are still plainly forbidden under their publicly posted policies.
They are called "Behavior Packs": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/minecraft/creator/document...
You can purchase content that runs behavior packs from the store, but it's all through soft currency purchased with per-platform stores.
Link to some of the content: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/catalog
As for the "not as powerful as Roblox", we're working on it :)
One app effectively violating that policy is WeChat with their mini programs, but they get away with it due to the fact that iOS without WeChat would be doa in China.
Apple clearly doesn't think these are the same thing either as demonstrated by their explicit policies allowing the former and their attempt to block cloud streaming apps from providing the latter, later turning into explicit policies specifically allowing it for cloud streaming apps and only cloud streaming apps, not Roblox-like apps.
There are Lua scripts intended to run on the "client" (such as camera scripts) but I was under the impression (I could be wrong) that even they were converted by a server into instructions sent to the client, not run as a Lua scripts in a local Lua interpreter on your iPad.
Or perhaps the lua code is sanitised by the server such that the lua code run on the client is not the same as submitted by the user. Many App Store games do have an embedded scripting system of some kind, just not one that can run code directly inputted by an end user.
The whole point of Apple's rules here are to force app functionality and features to be reviewed when submitting an app to the app store. Anybody can go and make complete games ("experiences") in Roblox and they will immediately be available on iOS without being reviewed by Apple. It's a full game engine that lets you write custom code, use custom assets, and replace everything. Take a look at Frontlines (https://www.roblox.com/games/5938036553/FRONTLINES) as an example of a game that looks nothing like Roblox.
If you were to release an iOS app and push new features and content to it OTA then you risk being kicked off the store if you get caught because you bypassed their review process and the store page may not be accurately describing the app anymore.