Apple Will Finally Let You Emulate Retro Games on Your IPhone
Retro gamers have long known that one of Android’s longstanding advantages over iOS is its support for emulators. If you want to play your favorite old-school Nintendo, Sony, or Sega games on your phone, the iPhone isn’t really for you unless you’re willing to either jailbreak your device or rely on more limited web emulators. than dedicated emulation applications.
Well, it wasn’t on my 2024 Apple bingo card, but times are a-changin’ in iOS: On Friday, the company updated its App Store review guidelines to include language regarding gaming emulators as follows:
Applications may offer certain software that is not built into the binary, such as HTML5 gadgets and minigames, streaming games, chatbots, and plugins. Additionally, retro game console emulator apps may offer game downloads.”
This is a big turnaround for Apple, and is likely the result of pressure from the US Department of Justice and the European Commission to open up iOS to more services and competition. The US Department of Justice’s case against Apple is based in part on a history of cracking down on things like cloud streaming and “super” apps. The company has since opened up support for cloud streaming apps like Xbox Cloud Gaming and GeForce Now. Friday’s rule changes also indicate that Apple will allow developers to offer HTLM5-based mini-apps that will support super apps such as WeChat, which provide similar services on other platforms.
These iOS-compatible emulators are not available yet, but developers are expected to start working on them soon.
Are emulators illegal?
Emulators sometimes get a bad rap because many people believe they are used for illegal games. But emulators themselves don’t necessarily break any laws: simply creating a program to play games on a particular platform is usually a legally sound practice. The problem often comes down to how these emulators run games, as well as the tactics that app developers use to reward their users.
Emulators allow you to play a ROM or digital game file. These files can be obtained legally (usually by purchasing the game), but they are often distributed illegally on the Internet. When emulators not only reproduce pirated firmware, but also actively show users how to download them… that’s where developers get into trouble.
Last month, Nintendo shut down the popular Switch emulator Yuzu for not only emulating games, but also for showing players how to pirate games. Seeing as how Nintendo goes after people who post music on YouTube , they are more than happy to take down developers who allow their users to “steal” games. So if a developer wants their emulator to be featured on the App Store, they will likely have to make sure that it can only play legally sourced ROMs.
This means that if popular Android emulators like Retroarch and Dolphin come out on iOS, they likely won’t offer any advice on how to install ROMs from the Internet. You’ll need to get your own ROM files from games you already own or from other legal sources like archive.org , which gets a pass to their ROM collection for digital preservation .