Game Emulators on iOS: A New Era for Apple and Retro Gaming
Apple always had a very strict policy about Apps in their own AppStore, which made it very safe but also very boring at the same time. If developers want to publish an App in the AppStore, Apple checks it from top to bottom and has strict rules about design as well. Furthermore, they used to charge a high fee for anything sold as In-App-Purchases. Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite was fed up paying these fees and bypassed their fee by adding their own payment system. Of course, Apple banned all Epic Games Apps from the AppStore, but recently Apple had to open their doors again in this case. Thanks to Epic Games and to the European Union, Apple was forced to weaken their AppStore policy and the Digital Markets Act was born. Not only Epic Games benefits from this, but anyone who sells digital goods via Apples Store.
One of the things, Apple hates just as much as 3rd party paymen methods are emulators of all kinds on iOS/iPadOS devices. Up until 2024, Emulators like for example Nintendo64 were forbidden in the AppStore. The only two options if you wanted an emulator on your iDevice was either to use Sideloading as a loophole or straight up to jailbreak your iDevice. Sideloading made use of the Apple Developer Account, which is intentionally used to test the Software you coded yourself on your own device bevore public release. This also meant that you could sideload any .ipa (Application archive file formats from Apple’s) to your personal device. The only downside was that the free developer account allows you too keep the sideloaded Apps for 7 days. Afterwards, you had to refresh the Apps or get a paid developer account. So far, third-party apps have been neither simple nor easy for iDevice users.
Retroarch - one for all
As I said, Epic games won againts Apple in court related to fees and third party Apps. In the European Union, apple is now forced to change many things, which they apparantly do not like 🙂 Since I already gained some experience with Jailbreaking some of my unused iDevices, I know how great Retroarch is. For most games, you do not need much computing power, so most of the games should even work on very old Devices. RetroArch combines N64, PPSSPP, PSX and many many more Cores for emulating old gaming consoles. You can see the whole list in their AppStore Description here. The amount of supported cores grows fast! Retroarch basically is Kodi but for retro-gaming. To make it even better, you do not have to download any third party AppStores, Retroarch is available directly in the AppStore.
You can see that the UI used to be an Android one, but all functions are working fine from my experience. Riley Testult’s Delta emulator is designed with more attention to detail, but only offers a fraction of the Cores and Features offered in Retroarch.
Emulation has never been easy. There are always files somewhere that you have to move back and forth. In the end, it may still not work as well as expected, but you have to expect that. For example, if you want to play PS1 games, you have to manually download and install the Firmware files. In different cases, input controllers may not work or some games even keep crashing. The positive aspect about that is, that Retroarch is open source with a massive community which works on improving the emulator all the time and offers help in case of problems.
Downloading is a good keyword! Since your iDevice has neither a CD Rom drive nor a way to read cassettes, you have to use digital copes of the games. In my case, it is not allowed to download those Games from the Internet as it constitutes a copyright infringement. I am sure you will find what you are looking for on the Internet though 🙂 This is not legal advice and may vary depending on where you live.
Retroarch offers tons of features, including NetPlay, changing Shaders, using cheats, playing with SaveStates, using custom overlays and even fast forward and rewind. I would defenetly suggest you to try out this emulator if you’re into old console games!
AltStore - old but gold!
As mentioned previously, before the Digital Markets Act existed, you could only use third party Apps on your iDevice via sideloading. The most popular option used to be AltStore for years. The creator, Riley Testult implemented many useful features like WIFI-refresing your Apps and much more. After the EU-laws were passed, Riley announced AltStore PAL is one of the first 3rd party AppStores in the Apple Universe. However, as Apple still likes to put obstacles in the way of developers, third-party app stores have to pay a so-called core technology fee for each user. AltStore passes this fee of €0.5 directly on to users, meaning that each user has to pay €1.8 per year. The difference presumably goes into the team’s pocket.
The only two Apps available now are the previously mentioned Delta emulator and an improved clipboard App which are both coded by Riley. This is because Apple’s notarization process takes weeks and months in their case. They check all Apps that are available in any AppStore on iOS. If you ask me, Apple purposely slows down this process. It’s just Apple things, but it’s annoying that apple is still so unwilling to do anything. I’m curious to see what else will happen in the coming weeks and whether we’ll see any more apps at all. You can follow what is going on about AltStore, right here on their X feed.
It’s sad to see that despite the Digital Market Act, Apple is still deliberately setting the hurdles for developers so high. So there is always a loophole. Hopefully we will see more apps like Retroarch for iOS in the near future that will excite the Apple community.
