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Retro gamers have long known that one of Android’s long-standing advantages over iOS is emulator support. If you want to play your favorite classic Nintendo, Sony, or Sega games on your phone, the iPhone is basically your choice, unless you’re willing to jailbreak your device or rely on a more limited web-based emulator. It will not be. than a dedicated emulation app.
Well, it wasn’t on the Apple Bingo card for 2024, but times are “changing” with iOS. The company updated its App Store review guidelines on Friday to include language targeting game emulators:
The App may offer certain software that is not embedded in the binary, specifically HTML5 mini-apps and mini-games, streaming games, chatbots, and plugins. Additionally, emulator apps for retro gaming consoles may offer game downloads. ”
This is a major reversal for Apple, likely the result of pressure from both the US Department of Justice and the European Commission to open up iOS to more services and competition. The Justice Department’s case against Apple is based in part on the company’s history of suppressing things like cloud streaming and “super” apps. The company has since started supporting cloud streaming apps such as Xbox Cloud Gaming and GeForce Now. Friday’s guideline changes also indicate that Apple will allow developers to offer HTLM5-based mini apps, which could support super apps like WeChat that offer that kind of service on other platforms. become.
These iOS-compatible emulators are not yet available, but we expect developers to start working on them soon.
Are emulators illegal?
Emulators sometimes get a bad reputation because many people assume that emulators are used to play games illegally. However, emulators themselves are not necessarily against the law. Simply building a program to play games for a particular platform is usually a legally sound thing to do. The problem often comes down to the way those emulators run games and the tactics app developers use to encourage users.
Emulators allow you to play game ROMs or digital files. Although these files can be obtained legally (usually by purchasing the game), they are also often distributed illegally on the Internet. When an emulator not only plays pirated ROMs, but actively shows users how to download them… that’s when developers run into trouble.
Last month, Nintendo shut down Yuzu, the popular Switch emulator for emulating games, essentially to teach players how to do it. pirate game.How Nintendo is tracking posters music YouTube is happy to exclude developers who allow users to “steal” their games. Therefore, if developers want to list their emulators on the App Store, they will likely need to allow only legally obtained ROMs to be played.
This means that even if popular Android emulators like Retroarch or Dolphin come to iOS, they likely won’t provide advice on installing ROMs from the internet. It is your responsibility to obtain your own ROM files from games you already own, or other legal sources such as archive.org, where you have a pass to your ROM collection for digital preservation.
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