Since Apple opened up its App Store to emulators in April, there has been a veritable gold rush of retro console emulators available for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro PC emulators, however, have been conspicuously absent And it was with an application that Apple had previously rejected

Apple has officially approved UTM SE, an app that emulates older computers to run classic software and games, and is now available for free on iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS was different from consoles, and rejected UTM SE from the App Store after a lengthy review process Apple also locked UTM SE out of the third-party marketplace in the European Union

At the time, the UTM SE team said it would not contest Apple's ruling because the app offered an "inferior experience" It is not clear what led to the reversal We have asked Apple for more information and will update when we hear back

According to a post by the UTM SE team on X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend, Apple has reconsidered its policy Part of the problem was that Apple's policy forbids providing JIT (Just In Time) compilers for certain apps; JIT compilers are frequently used among emulators due to their ease of development, but due to potential security risks, Apple restricting its use to certain applications Over the weekend, the UTM SE team, with the help of another developer, developed a workaround to create a "JIT-less build"

Like other emulators in the App Store, UTM SE is fairly bare-bones However, the app has a handy link to the UTM site, which includes emulation guides for Windows XP through Windows 11 There, you can also download a pre-built virtual Linux machine

The creation of JIT-less PC emulators has interesting implications for the emulator market as a whole The fact that one developer was able to sell on the App Store despite Apple's strict guidelines has motivated other developers to try their own workarounds to achieve success