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Comment by tophat02 | Hacker News Reader

This is a non-story. How could this developer have not known that Apple's app store agreement forbids emulators, interpreters, and so forth?

I mean, not only is it there in plain letters, but that particular clause was all over the interwebz! The fault here lies solely on the developer for spending all that time and money on development without reading the contract.

Or maybe I should say "praise". This is most likely a PR stunt to increase awareness of his product so he can then go sell it to jailbreakers (who are probably more likely to use, enjoy, and be able to understand it anyway).

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The comments below the article seem to explain why he thought it would be possible to submit the emulator and have it approved. The SEGA games in the app store contain emulators, and it looks as though there are more apps that do the same.

Inconsistency on Apple's part (haven't seen that before).

Maybe there is a difference between containing an emulator and emulating stuff you download from the internet. I don't know the SEGA stuff, but I suppose they just use an emulator internally.

Perhaps with some repackaging that C64 emulator could have made it into the App store, too: just claim it is an app that can run a lot of C64 games (that would have to be bundled with the app). Remove the part where it can run games downloaded from the internet.

Yes. In fact, there's a whole section in the developer agreement (section 3.3.2) that explicitly forbids using (non-built-in) interpreters on downloaded files. This might be a nice app, and maybe the guy thought he could roll the dice and sneak it past, but this is the rare open and closed case of Apple doing exactly what they said they were going to do.

> How could this developer have not known that Apple's app store agreement forbids emulators, interpreters, and so forth?

Because there are many apps in the App Store that are emulators or use interpreters?

According to Manomio's CEO, Apple had seemed excited about the app. That's hardly a guarantee that the app would be approved, but it seems rather ridiculous to express excitement about an app, only to reject it after Manomio had invested significant amounts of time and money into the project and had completed it.

Yeah really. Why didn't they get a contract to confirm their TOS exception?

Given the Sega thing, it sounds like if they package up individual games and sell it like that then they may be OK.

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