UTM SE Now in the App Store
Wes Davis (Hacker News, MacRumors):
Apple has approved UTM SE, an app for emulating a computer to run classic software and games, weeks after the company rejected it and barred it from being notarized for third-party app stores in the European Union. The app is now available for free for iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS.
After Apple rejected the app in June, the developer said it wasn’t going to keep trying because the app was “a subpar experience.” Today, UTM thanked the AltStore team for helping it and credited another developer “whose QEMU TCTI implementation was pivotal for this JIT-less build.”
OK, now this is completely incoherent. UTM is on the App Store itself (not a third-party store), but iDOS isn’t. I hope the iDOS dev resubmits and points at UTM.
Apple looks ridiculous with all this app review stuff. Like it has no idea what it’s doing, what’s OK and what’s not OK. That might have been acceptable in 2008 when it was figuring things out. But not in 2024.
Apple saw that they were going to be forced to notarize UTM for the EU alternative stores, AltStore, and as with Delta figured is better to allow it on the official App Store to undermine AltStore. That’s what’s happening over and over.
Thanks Apple for once again proving the best way to change the App Store rules is to submit an app to AltStore :)
App Store review is inconsistent at the best of times, but the situation with emulation is now beyond absurd. The MAME4iOS dev says their app has been rejected multiple times for ‘spam’.
[…]
But who’s to say Apple won’t change its mind next week, depending on what it thinks it can get away with? And I do wonder what will happen if someone dares to submit an Apple II or Mac emulator for review. Perhaps they should submit it to AltStore first – that at least appears to make Apple rethink.
[…]
And Apple’s ridiculous review stance means great devs won’t bother making emulators for iPhone and iPad. Why would they? Why spend months polishing an emulator only for Apple to arbitrarily decide to reject it? (And, yes, this is the wider App Store in microcosm. Creators of other apps and games increasingly feel the same way.)
I’m really sad Apple still forbids shipping apps with a JIT, but we are so close to having a usable Linux sandbox on an iPad that I will take whatever I can get.
I spent a few hours trying out UTM SE (which, if you’re new here, is a just-released version of the UTM front-end for QEMU that runs on iOS) on my M1 iPad Pro, and quickly came to the conclusion that it is not really usable to do local development out of the box.
It might be great to, say, run Windows 95 or older DOS games (and I’m still sore that the Mac OS 9.2.1 image vanished), but unlike the “real” UTM, using UTM SE on iOS or an iPad is severely hobbled by the lack of a JIT.
Previously:
- Delta 1.6 Rejected From the App Store
- iDOS 3 Rejected From the App Store
- UTM Blocked Outside App Store via Notarization
- iOS Retro Console Game Emulators
Update (2024-08-08): Craig Grannell:
MAME4iOS rejected for “spam” yet again, and App Store cannot explain how the folks behind it can move beyond what’s clearly an automated bottleneck.
3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Apple is proving the point that they shouldn't be the only ones to decide who gets to release an app. Real sideloading should be next
@Manx Agreed! Capriciously inconsistent app review has been their from the start. They simply have never been a good steward of the platform.
