- After months, Apple has finally allowed the UTM emulator into Europe’s Alt Store PAL.
- Coincidentally, it also allowed it in the official App Store at the same time.
- Apple does not have power of approval for alternative app stores in the EU.
Users frustrated by the power of their iPads dream of being able to just install macOS, Windows, or Linux on their tablets and using that instead. Well, now you can, but it’s… not great.
UTM is an open-source emulation and virtualization app that lets you run another operating system inside the host OS. You can use it to virtualize Linux or Windows on your Mac, for example. And now, months after an initial rejection, Apple has approved UTM SE for iOS. The problem is that, thanks to Apple’s restrictions, it is slow and still not the experience anyone hoped for.
“Finally. This was the emulator rejected just before WWDC from appearing in the App Store because Apple only wanted to allow emulators for gaming consoles, not retro personal computers. Apple also prevented it from being notarized for alternative distribution, which is something it should not be doing unless its executives really like skeptical phone calls from regulators,” says tech commentator Nick Heer on his Pixel Envy blog.
Virtual Machine
If you want to run a foreign operating system inside another one, there are two ways to do it. Virtualization is where you punch a hole in the host in order to run the virtualized OS on the “bare metal” of the computer. When Macs used the same Intel x86 processors as Windows PCs, for example, you could run Windows inside macOS, and it would run as well as if you’d just straight-up installed Windows on the Mac hardware directly.
“When I’m on the go I sometimes wish I had my Windows machine with me to quickly check something or access an application only available on that OS,” Michael Robert, a cybersecurity specialist at CyberArk, told Lifewire via email.
The other option is emulation. This involves building a software emulation of the hardware expected by the software you want to run. For example, if you want to emulate a Super Nintendo console on your Mac, you would have to recreate the entire console in software, run that, then load a game and run it inside the emulated console.
As you might expect, this is way, way slower than virtualization, but is the only option where virtualization is not available or supported. On the Mac, Apple maintains a virtualization framework to make this possible, but not on iOS or iPadOS.
Then, there’s one more complicating issue. In order to make emulation faster, developers use something called just-in-time-compilation, or JIT. This grabs extra computer code as the app is running and uses it to speed things up quite considerably. Unfortunately, Apple does not allow any remote code to be downloaded by apps on iOS, which means that JIT is out.
The result is that UTM SE is hobbled by both technical and bureaucratic limitations on the iPad. So, while running something like Linux or Windows inside UTM on your Mac is a grand experience, just like having another computer, doing it on the iPad is still a novelty and a janky one at that.
Apple
The problem here is clearly Apple. It could make the Mac’s virtualization tools available on the iPad and be done with it. But that would let users install and use software from outside the App Store, and as we have seen with the whole DMA debacle, with the EU forcing Apple to open up its platforms, that’s not something Apple wants to do.
UTM was first submitted to Apple for review three months ago. And not for the App Store, but for the Alt Store PAL, one of the first alternative app stores available in Europe thanks to the DMA. Apple eventually rejected it, which is not something it is allowed to do. The DMA lets Apple “notarize” apps before they can be distributed outside the official App Store, which means that Apple is allowed to vet apps for malware but nothing else. The problem is that Apple is treating this notarization process as a de-facto approval system and is using it to pick and choose the apps it allows.
UTM just gave up, saying the process just wasn’t worth the hassle, but last week, in a surprise move, Apple finally approved the app for the Alt Store PAL. And, at the same time, it also allowed it in the regular App Store, so anyone outside the EU can get it too. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Apple pulled the same trick when the Alt Store launched with its amazing Delta game emulator, suddenly dropping its decade-long ban on game emulators.
Why? Because if the Alt Store gains traction, it will become a genuine alternative destination for developers and users alike. By holding apps in an illegal approval limbo for months at a time, and then just approving them for its own platform anyway, it makes the Alt Store way less attractive to app developers.
At the same time, this all proves the value of competition, which is the DMA’s entire purpose. The Alt Store PAL only has three apps, and already Apple has reversed fundamental App Store rules in response to two of those. In some ways, this is an even better result than if Apple had just notarized those apps and been done with it. That would have restricted them to EU countries only, whereas now they are available in the US and worldwide.
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News Summary:
- Apple Has Approved the First PC Emulator for iOS, but It's Not What We Dreamed Of
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