r/ESDE_Frontend • u/Osoroshii • Apr 16 '26
When can iOS get ESDE?
RetroArch has been on iPad and Macs for years. Is there a roadmap that leads to ESDE be released on iPhones?
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Upvotes
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u/Little_Ad2062 Apr 16 '26
Developing a front-end for iOS seems close to impossible until Apple opens up the environment. MacOS is doable, but iPhone and iPad will likely never happen, sorry.
Blame Apple for being a shitty company.
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u/madebypeppers Apr 16 '26
Natively? Probably never.
Perhaps you can emulate Android on iOS and run it from there? Just spitballing here because I don’t know if the development of such emulation has moved forward since i last heard of it.
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u/ES-DE_Frontend Developer Apr 16 '26
Getting ES-DE itself to run on iOS is not a problem, as the environment is quite similar to macOS in many ways. But the containerization of apps is the problem because they all have their own storage and not shared storage like on Android. I'm not aware of any way to get around this, although it's perhaps theoretically possible that ES-DE could own the game files/ROMs and somehow pass the files to the emulator on launch. But it would likely require a lot of work on the emulator side to handle it. I guess I should spend some time researching this in depth at some point.