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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 8th, 2023
  • DarthYoshiBoy@kbin.socialtoRetroGaming@lemmy.world•Apple changes App Store rules to allow retro game emulators globally | TechCrunch
    0·
    8 months ago

    One has already been pulled, though seemingly for unrelated copyright issues?

    That said, I’m surprised that things have gotten to this point, I suppose time will tell once the property holders get involved how committed Apple is to this whole change, there’s still a lot of room to interpret the clause about conforming to all laws for the content that is being run in the app.

    Given that I didn’t think ANY emulators would make it into the Appstore, I’m going to retract my position. However, I think that we’re still in the “Fuck around” stage of things and there may yet be some “Find out” to come.

  • DarthYoshiBoy@kbin.socialtoRetroGaming@lemmy.world•Apple changes App Store rules to allow retro game emulators globally | TechCrunch
    11·
    9 months ago

    Dolphin requires JIT compilation and that is still verboten under these new guidelines.

    Further, the rule change says that these apps are allowed to “Download” ROMs, it doesn’t say that they can just play anything they want, it in fact says that they have to provide an index of everything their software might run and where it is downloaded from. The rules are not going to allow emulators as we know and love them. It says specifically that the software offered under the guidelines must be offered via In App Purchases, so in all,

    A) Emulators can exist

    B) They can download ROMs

    C) You have to comply with all applicable laws while you offer an emulator that allows people to download ROMs ಠ_ಠ

    D) “Software offered in apps under this rule must: use in-app purchase in order to offer digital goods or services to end users.”

    Which in whole means that they’ve allowed (for example) Sega to offer an Emulator app that will run ROMs of games that Sega owns, but they have to sell the ROMs to you individually via IAPs.

    Feel free to read their guidelines at https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#third-party-software, because there isn’t any way in my reading to interpret those rules as allowing something like Higan to exist on the app store, the new rules are such a narrow carve out that it’s hard to imagine that anyone is able to provide an emulator for iOS any time soon. They’ve opened a door that basically nobody could walk through and the people who could walk through it wouldn’t need to because they could just distribute the ROMs with the emulator to begin with, it’s business as usual for Apple.