No joke, if I could run my Steam library on my phone, I'd probably buy a new phone every year (and might need to, given what the thermals and rapid charge/discharge cycles would do to battery longevity). But Apple's current strategy is to provide a tool, then let developers do the work themselves; compare to Valve's efforts (and occasionally stepping on rakes when games update themselves).
As far as I can tell, the main issue for putting CrossOver on iOS is a lack of API support and an inability for iOS software to start new processes. AltStore and emulators on iOS are exciting, and with iPadOS and MacOS becoming increasingly similar, I hope to see someone give WINE on iOS a shot.
I would love to see a world where I can play my Steam library on my iPad or my iPhone, considering the wild amount of performance they can output, but the limitations of iOS make it very difficult or likely impossible.
They don’t care that much about the 30% (which was the best deal ever for a phone app store when it came out) except how the App Store sells hardware.
If only the platform was open enough that developers had real access, Apple might get away with like you say not providing first party support for gaming.
These are especially great on the various Android based gaming handhelds that are out now with Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and similar SoC's in them, but it works on a phone too
You can already do this with tools like Winlator of course, but Valve's performance patches would probably make the whole process a lot easier to get working easily.
Any such feature would come to Apple hardware last because of Apple's arbitrary software limitations (maybe it'll work in the EU?), of course, but once Proton goes full ARM, it's only a matter of time.
Apple already provides the translation layer to convert from DirectX 11 or 12 to Metal that Wine uses on Macs.
https://wccftech.com/apple-game-porting-toolkit-2-supports-a...
Proton does the exact same thing, only it translates DirectX into the Graphics API that Wine on Linux uses.
The new thing is that the M5 versions of the GPU cores picked up a 40% performance boost, on the version that just shipped on the new iPhones.
To registered developers, with no upstream or downstream support whatsoever.
> Proton does the exact same thing
For everyone, with upstream and downstream vendoring.
It's quite exciting to have two competing standards like this, it really makes you wonder which one developers will side with.
It's open source, you don't have to be registered with anything.
Wine already uses it.
Buy the commercial version of Wine for Mac, and you get end user support.
> It's quite exciting to have two competing standards like this,
Wine is the single open standard here.
> Being a fork of Wine, Proton maintains very similar compatibility with Windows applications as its upstream counterpart... Proton generally lags behind its upstream Wine base by several releases.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)
Apple and Valve are just providing layers that translate graphics API calls from the Windows standard DirectX API to Metal on Mac or Vulkan on Linux that Wine can use to support games on those platforms.
However, Proton lags behind on features available in the newer versions of upstream Wine.
The new project leadership team made the decision to prioritize getting their existing work upstreamed into the Linux kernel, before working on supporting newer SOCs.
It's been going well.
> We are pleased to announce that our graphics driver userspace API (uAPI) has been merged into the Linux kernel. This major milestone allows us to finally enable OpenGL, OpenCL and Vulkan support for Apple Silicon in upstream Mesa. This is the only time a graphics driver’s uAPI has been merged into the kernel independent of the driver itself, which was kindly allowed by the kernel graphics subsystem (DRM) maintainers to facilitate upstream Mesa enablement while the required Rust abstractions make their way upstream. We are grateful for this one-off exception, made possible with close collaboration with the kernel community.
https://asahilinux.org/2025/05/progress-report-6-15/
Alyssa didn't abandon the project, she completed it.
Are you under the impression that Linux is about to abandon OpenGL and Vulkan in favor of a new graphics API that only Alyssa could possibly implement?
Marcan already provided the tools needed to capture the data being passed back and forth between MacOS and the GPU, so you can see exactly what the newer versions of the SOC are doing that is different.
> We are pleased to announce that our graphics driver userspace API (uAPI) has been merged into the Linux kernel. This major milestone allows us to finally enable OpenGL, OpenCL and Vulkan support for Apple Silicon in upstream Mesa.
Guidance was provided...
> Maintainers who want to be involved in the Rust side can be involved in it, and by being involved with it, they will have some say in what the Rust bindings look like. They basically become the maintainers of the Rust interfaces too.
But maintainers who are taking the "I don't want to deal with Rust" option also then basically will obviously not have to bother with the Rust bindings - but as a result they also won't have any say on what goes on on the Rust side.
So when you change the C interfaces, the Rust people will have to deal with the fallout, and will have to fix the Rust bindings. That's kind of the promise here: there's that "wall of protection" around C developers that don't want to deal with Rust issues in the promise that they don't have to deal with Rust.
But that "wall of protection" basically goes both ways. If you don't want to deal with the Rust code, you get no say on the Rust code.
Put another way: the "nobody is forced to deal with Rust" does not imply "everybody is allowed to veto any Rust code".
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wgLbz1Bm8QhmJ4dJGSmTuV5w_...
To get anything done in the Linux mailing list you need iron will.
> With Linux 6.16 now out in the wild, it’s time for yet another progress report! As we mentioned last time, the Asahi and Honeykrisp Mesa drivers have finally found their way upstream. This has resulted in a flurry of GPU-related work, so let’s start there.
Seems that they are doing pretty well upstreaming their work.
Not much else I can think of as well.
M1 is still insane. Apps, OS emulation... just chuggs along.
Outside of that though, it’s really hard to tell the difference. M1 is/was a beast and plenty fast enough for daily work.