from Hacker News

Apple Updates App Store Guidelines to Permit Game Emulators, EU Music App Links

by bangonkeyboard on 4/5/24, 8:16 PM with 136 comments

• by jeff_tyrrill on 4/5/24, 11:21 PM

  The emulator change is a minor rule change about bundling and is not what many of the reactions to the change think.

  What people seem to think this means: Open-ended retro game emulators like Snes9x and Dolphin are now allowed. (I don't think this is correct.)

  What the change is actually doing: If you are the licensed publisher of a retro game collection, you can now offer them in one app (including perhaps downloading additional games added to the collection later) instead of splitting them into individual apps. Each game must be individually vouched for.[1]

  What is not changing: "Emulators" have long been allowed if the emulated code is bundled with the app and it is officially licensed.

  [1] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

  "4.7 [...] You are responsible for all such software offered in your app, including ensuring that such software complies with these Guidelines and all applicable laws. [...]"

  and

  "4.7.4 You must provide an index of software and metadata available in your app. It must include universal links that lead to all of the software offered in your app."

• by OatmealDome on 4/5/24, 10:20 PM

  Notably, Apple still does not allow non web browsing apps to use JIT recompilers. This precludes emulators for 6th generation and newer consoles (GameCube, etc) from running on the platform even with this guideline change.

  I submitted a DMA interoperability request for JIT recompilers, but Apple denied it on the grounds that it doesn't fall under Article 6(7) for "multiple reasons", including that JIT is only used by web browsers on iOS.

• by pridkett on 4/5/24, 10:40 PM

  Some of us remember back in 1999 when Steve Jobs announced that Connectix, a PSX emulator was coming to Macs. Different times, man. Luckily, YouTube doesn’t forget.

  https://youtu.be/3OqMcqRI-xA?si=lC2tbRWS-2UGe_8G

• by pininja on 4/5/24, 9:16 PM

  Very excited about this! But I’ve also been impatient and started using Eclipse for all of my Gameboy emulation over the last year.. it a PWA and uses local storage for game saves. https://eclipseemu.me/

• by resource_waste on 4/5/24, 11:41 PM

  Cool! I welcome the blue bubbles to my typical airplane ride for the last 12 years.

  I remember having a work iphone and bringing an old motorola smartphone on the plane just so I could play Zelda OOT.

• by retskrad on 4/5/24, 11:02 PM

  We need EU to force Apple to accept alternative browser engines on iOS. The iPad desperately needs desktop Chrome to become useful.

• by RedComet on 4/5/24, 9:09 PM

  The use of "retro" is interesting. Probably intended to exclude Switch emulators, but what will the cutoff be?

• by pipeline_peak on 4/5/24, 9:33 PM

  Steve Jobs announcing PlayStation emulator at MacWorld

  https://youtu.be/3OqMcqRI-xA?si=nUkGn6vLrLLMiGOP

• by devinprater on 4/6/24, 9:04 PM

  Another use for emulators is accessibility. Using OCR, or iOS' image and screen recognition, I can more easily understand what's going on in a game. For example, since I am blind, I cannot see game menus, so in games which I can play, like Mortal Kombat, or the original Dissidia Final Fantasy. There are also games like Blazblue, which are mostly voiced visual novels, but with text describing what the characters do. So, OCR works great for that. I just hate the Blazblue character select screen, since it's a selection wheel you have to turn, and it doesn't just snap to a single character either, oh no. You have to turn it until you get to one, and then it has to be exactly on that one point. But that's okay.

  My point is, if I didn't have emulation on a computer or device that has OCR and such, I wouldn't know much about the games I do play. Even tutorial messages are text, so in many cases I wouldn't even know how to play the game, especially in more complex fighting games like Dissidia Final Fantasy. So, running games on the one portable device I do have with accessibility, my iPhone, would honestly be great. And the DS has a few fighting games at least, so thanks to the person that shared that. Now we just need PSP! And PS1 does have MK, and Soul Blade, so that'll be really fun!

• by crooked-v on 4/5/24, 9:51 PM

  I have to wonder if behind the scenes there was any push here from companies that put out licensed emulation collections. For example, there are a ton of different SEGA collections that are nice GUIs around various ROMs, where doing a native port would both be a ton of work and kind of defeat the point of trying to faithfully carry across the original with exactly the same quirks.

• by voytec on 4/5/24, 9:27 PM

  Apple has been user-hostile on all possible fronts in their efforts to enforce renting model over media ownership.

  Some 10 years back iTunes had an option to stream or share media over network. It was cool to stuff iMac's 3TB HDD with audio CD rips and have all this music available on an iPhone or any other iDevice connected to the same local network. I had a VPN connection from iPhone to home network and all CD rips available anywhere.

  To avoid confusion: I'm talking about iTunes-specific functionality, not media files sharing. When iTunes was opened on an iMac, all iDevices in LAN automatically had all the media available through local iTunes apps. And then they "renamed" iTunes to Music...

  But even during the iTunes era they made it artificially difficult to own own media. One would think (or maybe I was delusional?) that media library fully synced from desktop iTunes to iPhone iTunes serves as kind of a backup. Nope - turns out that when desktop disk dies, one can't sync media from iPhone to the new desktop disk. Desktop iTunes was happy to suggest wiping iPhone media as a sync method.

• by DrNosferatu on 4/5/24, 11:13 PM

  By not allowing me to run the full gamut of emulators - on the hardware I own - Apple is depriving me of my rights as an EU citizen.

• by wjq on 4/6/24, 4:34 AM

  This is a great change coming from Apple. I was initially surprised by this considering how Apple usually dislikes it when you want to find a way to run your own binaries on iOS devices.

• by thih9 on 4/5/24, 9:08 PM

  Have any emulator apps been published and approved already?

• by doublerabbit on 4/5/24, 9:06 PM

  So what, we're now back to 2018 when emulators were all the hype? Cool.

  Err, why am I flagged from this thread? - I mean seriously cool. 2018 was the hype when emulators were the thing. It's great to see such.

• by withinboredom on 4/5/24, 9:14 PM

  > They want to use Apple's tools and technologies, distribute on the App Store , and benefit from the trust we've built with users - and pay Apple nothing for it

  This quote smells like a "self-induced problem" since they literally require developers to buy or rent their hardware to build an app and also (at least, previously) required developers to publish on the App Store. If I could build an iPhone app on my Windows machine and publish an app from my website, then their argument wouldn't make any sense.

• by talldayo on 4/5/24, 8:56 PM

  Better late than never...? Watching this all get walked back is kinda surreal, makes you wonder what the actual precedent was for keeping them off the App Store in the first place. There really shouldn't be that many hoops to running GBA4iOS on hardware you paid for.