By Jason Snell

April 29, 2024 11:28 AM PT

Emulate all the things, Apple

And just like that, Apple embraced retro game emulators in the App Store. Feeling pressure from regulators and from regulator-enabled alternative app marketplaces like AltStore, Apple decided to drop a decade-plus ban on game emulators on iOS and made them available worldwide.

Despite the fact that I’ve been told repeatedly that nobody cares about game emulators, somehow Riley Testut’s Delta is now topping the App Store charts. Sure, some of that is probably a natural tendency by some of us veteran App Store users to download forbidden fruit before Apple has a re-think and decides to ban it again. But there’s also a genuine interest in reconnecting with older games, something that’s been there all along on other platforms—but has always been blocked from iOS by Apple’s arbitrary policies.

I don’t think we’ll ever get a specific reason why Apple banned emulators on the App Store, but my guess is that it’s one of numerous rules Apple made in the early days based on the fear that platform security could be breached by any app that allowed outside code to be downloaded and run. It took quite a while for Apple to allow apps that interpreted languages like Python to be functional on the App Store, for example.

As is so often the case with Apple’s App Store policies, however, the general fear of legitimate security holes gets commingled with a broader desire to control a platform and choose who competes on it. See, for example, its insistence that Microsoft’s game-streaming service submit each individual game for Apple approval—a patently unworkable request that Microsoft turned down. (This is another rule that the newly regulation-fearing Apple policy crew has revoked recently, though it may be too little, too late, for Microsoft.)

So where do we go from here? While Apple’s acceptance of emulators in the App Store is groundbreaking, and should delight many fans of retro gaming consoles, it’s an extremely limited change. Nobody really knows how Apple defines any of the words in that phrase. How old is retro? Is an old computer on which you can play games a console?

I grew up playing games on early computers, including the Apple IIe. Does the ability to open a spreadsheet in AppleWorks disqualify an Apple II emulator that would otherwise let me play Lode Runner and Choplifter? And if so, why?

Another limitation of Apple’s policy is that for some emulators to work properly, they need to prepare software for execution using what’s called a just-in-time compiler. This is how, for example, you’d be able to play a PowerPC-processor-based game on an Apple silicon processor. But while Apple now allows game emulators, it doesn’t allow JIT technologies, ostensibly for security reasons.

This effectively bans a whole generation of game emulators. Apple should allow retro emulators of all kinds in the app store, and allow game emulators to use JITs to boost performance. Otherwise, its limited expansion of the rules feels mostly for show and not indicative of a real change in approach to App Store rules.

But I want more—and this is a case where Apple’s own intellectual property comes into play. I mentioned the Apple II earlier, but I also played a lot of games on the classic Macintosh. I realize there are potential legal and licensing issues here, but wouldn’t it be great if Apple officially blessed emulators that emulated old Apple devices, like both the Apple II series and classic Macs?

Even better: What if Apple officially released all the ROMs and system images required to run classic Mac OS on iOS? Right now, all old emulators of Apple hardware operate on a sort of wink-wink-nudge-nudge approach where you’re supposed to dump your legitimate Apple ROM images to a file, when in fact most people just download them from the wilds of the Internet. I realize how old stuff may be encumbered legally in a lot of ways, but maybe one of the world’s most valuable companies could task a small group to clear their old intellectual property for those who might delight in playing old games again?

My next suggestion goes to the heart of the incompatibilities that happen as platforms evolved. As Apple has progressed iOS, numerous games and other apps have broken and are no longer usable on modern iPhone and iPad hardware. Those files still exist in the App Store, accessible by old devices, but not modern ones.

Today’s iOS hardware is impressively powerful. So… what if Apple put some effort into virtualizing old versions of iOS itself? It would unlock all sorts of classic apps still available in the App Store, and allow developers of those apps a pathway to keep them alive without expensive and impractical updates.

Finally, here’s my wildest (yet, I assure you, entirely practical) suggestion for Apple: Just embrace virtualization in all forms. Apple’s chips are built with powerful virtualization features in them anyway. Maybe it’s time to let iPhone and iPad users run Windows, Linux, and yes, even modern macOS in virtual machines. The iPhone and especially the iPad have the power to do it.

What are we waiting for? Let’s emulate all the things. The more Apple can do to make this a reality, the better.

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