Apple Has Allowed Game Emulators On The App Store — Just Not Good Game Emulators
I wrote a post a while ago called Spotify Made Apple Do It talking about a little conspiracy theory that the reason that the DMA exists is because of lobbying from Spotify. I thought it was outrageous when I originally heard it. But Apple recently put out some new App Store rules which made me go, “Hmm… maybe there is something to this conspiracy theory.”
In that post I also dissected the rest of the App Store rules. There were two big changes. First the Spotify rules. And then some changes that explicitly allowed for ‘retro game emulators’.
Which begs the question: what’s Retro? Obviously something like the NES would be retro. But what about.. the GameCube? The PS3? The Nintendo Switch? The Switch was released over 5 years ago. Here’s my definition for ‘retro’: any console the iPhone can emulate at over 15 FPS.
Oh how naïve I was. I just thought, “You know all those apps available to Jailbroken phones? They’re now available on the iPhone now!” No, that’s not how it’s going to work.
Turns out Apple, in typical Apple fashion, has some rules on how emulation is going to work.
So this story comes from the developers of DolphiniOS, a fork of the Dolphin Emulator, an emulator for GameCube and Wii games, and…
