By Jason Snell

April 29, 2024 11:28 AM PT

Emulate all the things, Apple

And just like that, Apple embraced retro game emulators in the App Store. Feeling pressure from regulators and from regulator-enabled alternative app marketplaces like AltStore, Apple decided to drop a decade-plus ban on game emulators on iOS and made them available worldwide.

Despite the fact that I’ve been told repeatedly that nobody cares about game emulators, somehow Riley Testut’s Delta is now topping the App Store charts. Sure, some of that is probably a natural tendency by some of us veteran App Store users to download forbidden fruit before Apple has a re-think and decides to ban it again. But there’s also a genuine interest in reconnecting with older games, something that’s been there all along on other platforms—but has always been blocked from iOS by Apple’s arbitrary policies.

I don’t think we’ll ever get a specific reason why Apple banned emulators on the App Store, but my guess is that it’s one of numerous rules Apple made in the early days based on the fear that platform security could be breached by any app that allowed outside code to be downloaded and run. It took quite a while for Apple to allow apps that interpreted languages like Python to be functional on the App Store, for example.

As is so often the case with Apple’s App Store policies, however, the general fear of legitimate security holes gets commingled with a broader desire to control a platform and choose who competes on it. See, for example, its insistence that Microsoft’s game-streaming service submit each individual game for Apple approval—a patently unworkable request that Microsoft turned down. (This is another rule that the newly regulation-fearing Apple policy crew has revoked recently, though it may be too little, too late, for Microsoft.)

So where do we go from here? While Apple’s acceptance of emulators in the App Store is groundbreaking, and should delight many fans of retro gaming consoles, it’s an extremely limited change. Nobody really knows how Apple defines any of the words in that phrase. How old is retro? Is an old computer on which you can play games a console?

I grew up playing games on early computers, including the Apple IIe. Does the ability to open a spreadsheet in AppleWorks disqualify an Apple II emulator that would otherwise let me play Lode Runner and Choplifter? And if so, why?

Another limitation of Apple’s policy is that for some emulators to work properly, they need to prepare software for execution using what’s called a just-in-time compiler. This is how, for example, you’d be able to play a PowerPC-processor-based game on an Apple silicon processor. But while Apple now allows game emulators, it doesn’t allow JIT technologies, ostensibly for security reasons.

This effectively bans a whole generation of game emulators. Apple should allow retro emulators of all kinds in the app store, and allow game emulators to use JITs to boost performance. Otherwise, its limited expansion of the rules feels mostly for show and not indicative of a real change in approach to App Store rules.

But I want more—and this is a case where Apple’s own intellectual property comes into play. I mentioned the Apple II earlier, but I also played a lot of games on the classic Macintosh. I realize there are potential legal and licensing issues here, but wouldn’t it be great if Apple officially blessed emulators that emulated old Apple devices, like both the Apple II series and classic Macs?

Even better: What if Apple officially released all the ROMs and system images required to run classic Mac OS on iOS? Right now, all old emulators of Apple hardware operate on a sort of wink-wink-nudge-nudge approach where you’re supposed to dump your legitimate Apple ROM images to a file, when in fact most people just download them from the wilds of the Internet. I realize how old stuff may be encumbered legally in a lot of ways, but maybe one of the world’s most valuable companies could task a small group to clear their old intellectual property for those who might delight in playing old games again?

My next suggestion goes to the heart of the incompatibilities that happen as platforms evolved. As Apple has progressed iOS, numerous games and other apps have broken and are no longer usable on modern iPhone and iPad hardware. Those files still exist in the App Store, accessible by old devices, but not modern ones.

Today’s iOS hardware is impressively powerful. So… what if Apple put some effort into virtualizing old versions of iOS itself? It would unlock all sorts of classic apps still available in the App Store, and allow developers of those apps a pathway to keep them alive without expensive and impractical updates.

Finally, here’s my wildest (yet, I assure you, entirely practical) suggestion for Apple: Just embrace virtualization in all forms. Apple’s chips are built with powerful virtualization features in them anyway. Maybe it’s time to let iPhone and iPad users run Windows, Linux, and yes, even modern macOS in virtual machines. The iPhone and especially the iPad have the power to do it.

What are we waiting for? Let’s emulate all the things. The more Apple can do to make this a reality, the better.

By Shelly Brisbin

April 19, 2024 2:09 PM PT

Review: Zoom H6essential talks the talk and walks the walk

I’ve used Zoom audio recorders for many years, including the Podtrac P4 I wrote about here a couple of years ago. I carry a Zoom H4n Pro in my backpack for radio field work. And a Zoom H6 has been my go-to in-person podcasting rig, since you can connect up to six mics, and make multitrack recordings with ease. But the display on my H6 crapped out, and the rubberized case began to suffer from what the Internet tells me is called “rubber reversion.” That means the case got all sticky. In the meantime, Zoom has released a set of new handheld recorders; the Essential series, with a couple of features I’ve been craving. So right before a big reporting trip, I replaced my H6 with the H6essential.

Continue reading “Review: Zoom H6essential talks the talk and walks the walk”…

By Joe Rosensteel

April 18, 2024 2:42 PM PT

Does everything need to be an ad?

Increasingly, every pixel in front of our eyes is fought over by a pool of large technology companies that are trying to squeeze fractions of cents out of ads and promotions.

There’s a lack of care and thoughtfulness about all of these moves. Instead, there’s just an assumption that as long as they can pry someone’s eyes open, “Clockwork Orange”-style, then they’ve helped activate those reluctant viewers with brands.

Last week, YouTube rolled out a new version of its app for Apple TV. It overrides the screensaver by starting a slideshow just before the Apple TV’s screensaver is supposed to come on. If you’re watching a video, it’ll be an endless loop zooming into the video’s thumbnail and fading to black. If you were just paused somewhere in the app’s interface, it’ll be stills taken from a random assortment of YouTube videos on nature, or stills from drone footage.

The YouTube logo is burned in to the upper left as a static image in white, and a graphic for the directional pad with the “up” arrow highlighted in white appears in the bottom right corner. You can hit the up button to resume that paused video (instead of just pushing play???) or, if it’s one of the heavily compressed video stills, it’ll take you to that video of drone footage and start playing it.

Fortunately, when I complained about this on Mastodon, Rob Bhalla got in touch and told me that he fixed it by changing the Apple TV screensaver timing to start at two minutes, instead of the default five. Sure enough, that makes the screensaver start before the slideshow can, because YouTube has no idea what your Apple TV’s screensaver settings are. They just guessed that most people will leave them at the default, and hard coded that timing in for their slideshow.

YouTube’s not doing this out of concern over screen-burn-in. (Those static white graphics prove that.) And they don’t have a better screensaver. YouTube’s screensaver has no settings, because this isn’t for you to control. YouTube is undoubtedly staking out real estate so they can inject advertising and promotion into it at a later date. (No, YouTube hasn’t said that the screensaver is a future home of ads, but there’s absolutely no other reason to add this feature.)

Even if you have the ad-free YouTube Premium, like I do, you’ll see the screen stealer. It seems like it was something that’s been tested for a while, with some users reporting that they saw it months ago, not just in the most recent app release. But now everyone I’ve talked to on the current version is being subjected to it.

The pause that advertises

Roku was in the news just the other week when Janko Rottgers came across a patent that they filed to inject ads from the display device (meaning a TV with Roku software) over paused video streams from input sources, like an Apple TV.

Roku already boasts about selling ad placement in their cityscape screensaver, and offered a branded takeover of the screensaver for “Barbie” last summer.

Imagine a future where Roku injects ads over the YouTube app injecting ads. Will there be a cat-and-mouse game over who gets to sell access to the screen you paused when you went to the bathroom?

Meanwhile, those whiz kids in Redmond are testing out using the Windows Start menu to promote apps. From Tom Warren at The Verge:

Microsoft started testing ads inside the File Explorer of Windows 11 last year before disabling the experiment in beta versions of Windows 11. Microsoft has been experimenting with ads inside Windows for more than 10 years. There are already promotional spots on the Windows 10 lock screen and in the Start menu, so it’s not exactly surprising to see them appear in Windows 11, too.

Classy, classy stuff.

It’s hardly necessary to recount, but Amazon does some pretty sketchy stuff in its quest for money. Jason Snell and I have both removed the Amazon Echo Show from our lives because the things are haunted by noisy, intrusive offers that outweigh their utility.

Amazon also executed the most brazen maneuver out of all the others when they flipped the switch this year on every Prime subscriber getting ads in Prime Video unless those users paid more. A brilliant move when they have a captive audience.

Petites pommes de terre

All those companies look terrible. Not like those saints over at Apple. They certainly haven’t junked up the experience of using their devices in the pursuit of small potatoes.

Using Apple devices without Apple services is subpar, and Apple will take every opportunity to make you aware of that, on every Apple Device that you own. From their perspective this promotion is first party, and it has something that’s like truth to it. Close enough.

Let’s circle back to the Apple TV. The tvOS updates have gradually started to beef up emphasis on the TV app as place to go for your TV-watching needs. However, that’s only true if you really want to watch the Apple TV+ shows that Apple is currently promoting.

If you launch the app after an OS update, and you’re not a current subscriber, you get whisked to the Apple TV+ tab where you will get autoplaying video, and spiel about all the great Apple TV+ content you’re missing out on. This happens every time there’s a point update.

If you go to the Home section of the TV app, you’ll get the same carousel sales pitch for Apple TV+ shows that you’d get if you were in the Apple TV+ section. It’s not left to stand on its own. Apple doesn’t trust you to pay enough attention to them.

TV+ isn’t playing hard to get, or trying to lure me back with mystery. It all just turns into interface noise, frustrating what I want to do. This screen real estate belongs to Apple, not to me.

Just like all these other companies shoving promotions in, Apple doesn’t think it’s a villain. It thinks it’s increasing awareness and fostering discovery! (Never mind that if you are an Apple TV+ subscriber, you’ll see shows in the carousel that you’ve already watched.)

After all, Apple TV+ shows and movies are critically acclaimed, darlings, especially Argylle. If what you want to watch doesn’t fit into that category, that’s your problem, not Apple’s.

Apple is on the verge of launching their ad-supported Apple TV+ tier. I doubt that they’ll be as bold as Amazon when they do, but they’re not going to be quiet about how much they’d like you to subscribe to the ad-supported tier.

Apple Music? Well, there’s not a lot to differentiate it from other music streaming services, but if you don’t sign up, good luck with the app. There don’t seem to be ad-supported plans, but promoting Music itself is the killer ad, really.

The News app that exists to promote Apple News+? That’s a harder sell, because there’s absolutely nothing critically acclaimed about News+. It might have something that’s critically acclaimed buried in the interface somewhere, but they can hardly take credit for that. They can take credit for spamming everyone about the crossword.

The only thing the News team is interested in is whether or not you’ll fork over more money. They even supplement it with really bad ads in the interface that parade around as news, like ads from The Penny Saver.

There are bad ads in the Stocks app, and Apple’s at least tested ads in Maps, but Mark Gurman’s rumor about that was from 2022, so I’m not clear if we’ll see it, or someone has been able to hold the line on keeping that out.

Speaking of bad ads, let’s not forget that the App Store needs to skim more money from developers and confound users by inserting ads into that interface as well.

Until third-party app marketplaces are really real, everyone will have to go to search for a specific app and then scroll past the bombastic ad masquerading as the first search result to get to the app they actually want. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone, including the most valuable company in the world.

These are the tactics of companies that sell hardware at a reduced cost, like TV manufacturers, where the hardware is a commodity. Unless Apple starts arguing that they make commodity hardware that needs to be subsidized, I think they should reconsider.

Will it ever be enough?

When I complained about YouTube’s screensaver on social media, I was told to leave a one-star review on the App Store. Like that’s the leverage we have over YouTube. When I wrote about Amazon sticking ads into Prime Video, several people told me that they’d swear off Amazon. (At press time, Amazon is still doing quite well.) It’s worse than vowing you’ll never fly an airline again.

There is little in the way of taste or thoughtfulness to these things that are embedded in Apple’s shipping software. The push for pennies is inculcated into Apple’s business and culture nearly as much as the promoted apps in Microsoft’s Start Menu, Amazon’s junked-up Echo Shows, Roku’s city-for-sale, and YouTube’s screen stealer.

It’s not that advertising is evil, but taking a spot that didn’t have an ad and “innovating” by wedging an ad in there is.

I suspect that the people responsible for plastering Apple TV+ in the interface think they’re better than the people at YouTube injecting a screensaver slideshow. I’m positive everyone thinks they’re better than Amazon.

There must be people at these companies that look at this level of self-serving hackery and realize that they’ve gone too far. But for that to happen, there need to be executives who can see the value in not viewing every inch of interface as an opportunity for more revenue generation.

I’m not optimistic.

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist, writer, and co-host of the Defocused and Unhelpful Suggestions podcasts.]

By Dan Moren

April 18, 2024 8:20 AM PT

Apple’s emulator about-face is good for everyone

Less than two weeks after Apple changed its rules on emulators, Riley Testut’s Delta game emulator climbed to the number one spot in the U.S. App Store within twelve hours of its launch. If Testut’s names sounds familiar it’s because he’s also the purveyor of the recently launched Alt Store PAL, the first third-party app marketplace in the European Union, enabled by the Digital Markets Act.

On Mastodon, MacStories’s John Voorhees described Delta’s success as “what pent up demand looks like.”

I’d go further and say it’s not pent-up but penned up. This wasn’t merely a case of waiting for a company to release a product it hadn’t gotten to yet—like when Apple released the iPhone 6 amid desire for a larger phone—but of a product that was actively withheld as a matter of policy. Nothing technical prevented Delta from running on iOS three weeks ago, or even three years ago. (To that point: Delta was already available for those iOS users who wanted to engage in the necessary circumventions.) Apple had merely decided, as a matter of policy, not to allow emulators on the App Store for its own reasons.¹

The reversal was less capricious: with the launch of third-party marketplaces in the EU, of which the previously mentioned Alt Store PAL (with Delta as its marquee offering) is at the forefront, Apple is attempting to neutralize one of the biggest advantages of those competitors. Emulators like Delta are often used as an example of something that Apple wouldn’t allow in its own stores that third-party marketplaces could offer instead. There’s probably no other category of apps that replaces it in that regard.² With emulators now available on the App Store worldwide, it will be interesting to see if there’s anything else that draws users towards third-party stores in Europe.

One view of this is that Apple allowing for emulators on its platform is competitive. And that’s true…but it’s equally true that it was dragged kicking and screaming into this competition by outside forces.

Think different, compete better

Last week, I wrote that the change of Apple’s policy was that regulation—or the threat of regulation—works. My pal John Gruber suggested that should be revised to “regulation can work” or “regulation sometimes works”. That seems to me to go without saying: not all regulation is good or implemented well any more than all business decisions are. But let me take my own shot at revising my thesis: regulation—or, more broadly, the existence of regulatory bodies—is necessary.

There are those who think that all problems in business should be solved by the market, as though envisioning a mano-a-mano, no-holds-barred, winner-take-all cage match between corporations.

But this specific case of emulators would seem to point out the shortcomings of that view. Clearly, there was plenty of demand for emulation apps—take Delta’s success as evidence—but Apple steadfastly refused to meet that demand by allowing for supply. It didn’t do so until essentially forced into it by regulatory changes in the European Union.³ Without that change, the chances that Apple would have eventually made the decision on its own is vanishingly small.⁴

One of John’s recurring points is that Apple is consistent: “Apple’s own needs first, users second, developers third.” An astute observation, if not particularly surprising for any profit-seeking corporation, but this situation also makes clear that no amount of combined demand from users or developers will outweigh Apple’s own needs. What makes the emulator situation particularly strange is that offering them on the App Store doesn’t actually seem to hurt Apple at all—and probably even helps it, given the evident popularity of the category. This is the rare situation that’s good for everybody.⁵

This is why the existence of regulatory bodies and use of regulation, even if it isn’t always universally good or correct, is a necessity to get the best out of competition—to keep the system honest, the playing field level. Checks and balances are just as important for business as for a system of government, and the bigger and more powerful companies get, the even more important it is.

Recent comparisons of Apple to Boeing may not be entirely apt, but here’s one place where I think there is some similarity: Boeing operates in an industry where it is (in the U.S. at least) the market share leader, and together with its largest rival, Airbus, dominates the field as an effective duopoly. As of 2018, the two manufacturers accounted for about two-thirds of all commercial airlines in use in the U.S.; those numbers go even higher if you’re talking about just larger airplanes like jumbo jets—or perhaps we could call them “performance aircraft.” I don’t think anybody would argue that Boeing’s in need of less regulation.

Or, if I can be permitted another analogy, much as we get mad at the umpires for bad calls, they’re on the field to keep the teams honest and to provide impartial accountability. John and I would probably both find a game between the Red Sox and the Yankees without any umpires to be entertaining, but I’m not sure either of us believe it would show off the real spirit of competition.⁶

The success of Delta illustrates that perhaps it’s time for both Apple and the App Store to evolve. Despite our fond memories of the team that once hoisted a pirate flag over its campus, a trillion-dollar corporation is not a bunch of maverick upstarts. The idea of Tim Cook putting up the Jolly Roger on the roof of Apple Park⁷ is not only risible in the extreme, but displays a lack of self-awareness for the current state of affairs. Let’s not root for Apple to win—let’s root for Apple to do better.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]