I bought my first Android phone in late 2010. Its 600 MHz single-core CPU just barely ran a GBA emulator at playable speeds. The screen wasn’t multitouch and a bug in the operating system (fixed about a year or two later by the manufacturer) meant that any time the screen was being touched, CPU load would shoot up to 100% and everything slowed down to a crawl, which meant I could only play turn-based titles. That’s how I discovered Advance Wars.
On a related note I was recently incredibly impressed to see how well Dolphin Emulator runs GameCube and Wii games on Android, though even fully working touch controls aren’t really viable for anything other than glorious turn-based combat!
PS2 emulation is my recent surprise. If you have a powerful enough device, then AetherSX2 will run games extremely well on it. Less powerful devices can still run PSP games using the remarkable PPSSPP emulator.
Then there’s the whole business of emulating Windows PCs. There’s a number of impressive apps that can be used to play even fairly new titles. I believe Winlator is the latest.
I’ve only used it with older games so far, but it works really well already. If you don’t mind a bit of fiddling with the configuration, I highly recommend trying it out.
Edit: ETA Prime’s video on the emulator is a few months old already, but it’s a good starting point:
Yes, or paying the $100 fee for a free FOSS app, or publishing an app that is too ‘spicy’ like an app for fetlife, or ‘possibly embarassing’ like emulators that can be used to play pirated content. There’s only positives here IMO.
Edit: Oh yes or full-featured browsers like Firefox of course, like @Inxtx mentions. Good point. I always use Firefox on Android because it blocks many trackers by default and has uBlock Origin and Dark Reader.
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Once this is implemented, what sort of apps are people hoping to see available?
We’ll probably see shitloads of spyware and other questionable apps.
I doubt it. Apple will make the process scary enough that users won’t get tricked into this.
Depends on how open the EU will force them to be.
I’ve definitely noticed a demand for emulators. Apple does not permit those on their app store.
Crazy that they’re still not allowed, I remember using a great gameboy emulator on a jailbroken iPod touch in like 2010
I bought my first Android phone in late 2010. Its 600 MHz single-core CPU just barely ran a GBA emulator at playable speeds. The screen wasn’t multitouch and a bug in the operating system (fixed about a year or two later by the manufacturer) meant that any time the screen was being touched, CPU load would shoot up to 100% and everything slowed down to a crawl, which meant I could only play turn-based titles. That’s how I discovered Advance Wars.
On a related note I was recently incredibly impressed to see how well Dolphin Emulator runs GameCube and Wii games on Android, though even fully working touch controls aren’t really viable for anything other than glorious turn-based combat!
PS2 emulation is my recent surprise. If you have a powerful enough device, then AetherSX2 will run games extremely well on it. Less powerful devices can still run PSP games using the remarkable PPSSPP emulator.
Then there’s the whole business of emulating Windows PCs. There’s a number of impressive apps that can be used to play even fairly new titles. I believe Winlator is the latest.
Yeah x86 emulation is actually huge, is winlator in a usable state yet?
I’ve only used it with older games so far, but it works really well already. If you don’t mind a bit of fiddling with the configuration, I highly recommend trying it out.
Edit: ETA Prime’s video on the emulator is a few months old already, but it’s a good starting point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd30iUUkJ1A
Amazing, I’m saving that!
All sorts of FOSS projects that understandably can’t be bothered dealing with Apple’s absurd App Store policies.
Yes, or paying the $100 fee for a free FOSS app, or publishing an app that is too ‘spicy’ like an app for fetlife, or ‘possibly embarassing’ like emulators that can be used to play pirated content. There’s only positives here IMO.
Edit: Oh yes or full-featured browsers like Firefox of course, like @Inxtx mentions. Good point. I always use Firefox on Android because it blocks many trackers by default and has uBlock Origin and Dark Reader.
Browsers with engines other than the WebKit, e.g. native Firefox with the Gecko.
The FOSS community will gain momentum.
They should allow gecko browsers in the apple store too, otherwise Mozilla won’t bother making it for only a few users.