Apple App Store Update Says Emulation Is Coming Back. Kind Of. Well…Maybe.

For years and years, Apple has done its best to prevent emulators from appearing in its App Store. Given Apple’s walled-garden approach, not to mention console manufacturers never-ending hatred for emulators generally, it wasn’t a huge shock that Apple went this route. Even when the occasional workaround has been discovered to allow people to get emulators onto their iPhones, Apple has been consistent about shutting those down.

For years, emulation enthusiasts have complained about this practice. After all, emulators themselves are perfectly legitimate and there are a ton of valid reasons for using them. Sure, sometimes emulators are used to infringe copyright on games never purchased by those playing them, but that is a subset of the total use of an otherwise valid tool.

Well, Apple recently released an update on its platform informing developers of changes to App Store policies, and it includes an interesting change.

When Apple posted its latest update to the App Store’s app review and submission policies for developers, it included language that appears to explicitly allow a new kind of app for emulating retro console games.

Apple has long forbidden apps that run code from an external source, but today’s announced changes now allow “software that is not embedded in the binary” in certain cases, with “retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games” specifically listed as one of those cases.

Now, Apple has long forbidden apps that allow software to be run that is not included in the binary while claiming its doing so for security reasons. After all, if Apple can lock down what gets to an iPhone to specifically the code and software it can review before it goes into the App Store, it can prevent calls to software and code from outside the walled garden, which could contain non-reviewed malicious content. But that was never really the whole point. It was also about control and one of the aspects of that control has been to disallow emulators to call out to ROMs outside of the program itself. In other words, an emulator that pitched itself as legit on its own, but which also offered the ability to go out and get infringing ROMs, was disallowed.

This change opens the door, but nobody expects it to be open beyond the barest of slivers.

It’s not completely clear from Apple’s wording, but our interpretation of Apple’s new rules is that it’s likely only the last of those examples will be possible; companies that own the intellectual property could launch emulator apps for downloading ROMs of their (and only their) games. So, for example, Sega could offer a Sega app that would allow users to download an ever-expanding library of Sega games, either as part of a subscription, for free, or as in-app purchases. Sega has offered its retro games on the iPhone before in emulation but with a standalone app for each game.

“You are responsible for all such software offered in your app, including ensuring that such software complies with these Guidelines and all applicable laws,” Apple writes. And it specifically says “retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games” in the list of exceptions to the rules against “software that is not embedded inside the binary”—but it doesn’t list any other method for retro game console emulator apps.

If that’s how this shakes out, it all still kind of sucks. Again, there are plenty of uses for console emulators, even for major consoles like older Nintendo systems and the like. Some companies offer ROMs up without issue. There are a ton of home-brew games out there that would be legit to download. Some games come from companies that no longer exist and published games for which the rights to them are entirely in limbo. The emulator is just a tool, not something that infringes in and of itself.

So do I expect game emulation to come roaring back to the iPhone? Nah, not really. But the door is no longer fully shut to emulators, so perhaps there is hope.