Apple Approves iDOS 3 Following Emulator Rule Change (theverge.com) 6
An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple recently rejected DOS emulator iDOS 3 from the App Store, but following App Store rule changes that look to have cleared the way for PC emulator apps, iDOS 3 is now available for download, developer Chaoji Li announced. In June, Li said that Apple had rejected iDOS 3 because it violated App Store guideline 4.7.
At the time, that rule was what allowed retro game console emulator apps to appear on the store, but Apple was only allowing retro game console emulators under the rule -- not PC emulators; UTM SE, another PC emulator app, had also said it was rejected for violating the rule.
But in July, Apple reversed course and approved UTM SE, and earlier this month, it added the words "PC emulator" to guideline 4.7, which is seemingly why iDOS 3 has now been allowed on the App Store.
At the time, that rule was what allowed retro game console emulator apps to appear on the store, but Apple was only allowing retro game console emulators under the rule -- not PC emulators; UTM SE, another PC emulator app, had also said it was rejected for violating the rule.
But in July, Apple reversed course and approved UTM SE, and earlier this month, it added the words "PC emulator" to guideline 4.7, which is seemingly why iDOS 3 has now been allowed on the App Store.
This would be big news but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple's developer guidelines still prohibit JIT compilation, so any emulator that's in the official App Store is going to have artificially crippled performance. I realize that may not be the end of the world for some of the really old DOS apps, but the DOS era lasted quite awhile and there are some games that will absolutely make a poorly optimized emulator choke. It's a shame, that's Apple for you.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: This would be big news but... (Score:2)
Presumably apple is using JIT for Safari, so that's plausible. But I'd expect them to tackle the web browser issue in general at the same time.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, Safari can use JIT. But that's because Safari's in a much deeper app isolation jail than other apps are. There are very limited things Safari can do so even if you had malicious Javascript compiled to jailbreak, it would have to defeat a much more secure jail than a normal app.
I suppose Apple could allow JIT to take place if you use this more secure jail, but li
Re: (Score:2)
I suppose Apple could allow JIT to take place if you use this more secure jail, but likely the limitations would render it fairly useless.
Now wait, is the story that you can do anything useful in a web browser, or that the limitations placed on Safari would make applications useless? I can't quite seem to get this straight.
Most OSes support this form as "low integrity" processes - they download external code and run it so they need to be sandboxed even more than normal.
Let it run only in a virtual machine that cannot access the entire system, for all I care. There's just no good reason to ban JIT unless there are serious architectural weaknesses involved.
So PC is now PC (Score:3)
How do you like them apples?