Alternative stores and emulators, now the iPhone is really a pleasure

In early April, Apple had to give in to the demands of the European Union's Digital Markets Act. Opening its ecosystem to third-party app and game shops was a huge blow for Apple, also in perspective. Videogames, multimedia streaming, collaboration platforms, any software that is compatible with iPhones can now be installed on the phone in an alternative way to the classic App Store. One clicks on an external website and downloads the package, which can be a new app shop or a single application. A modus operandi that Apple has always opposed mainly for one reason: security. In the age of malware that is practically everywhere, allowing so-called 'sideloading' of apps could increase the risk of infection, despite the checks that iOS automatically performs to control the system.

The alternative is poor

That said, opening the App Store we will never find any reference to a competing project. To find out what is out there, one has to rely on specialised portals, forums, with an eye more careful than ever to try to prevent 'fake' stores, which would create more than one problem. At the moment, the most famous of all, and among the first, is Alt Store PAL. To download it, one has to pay a symbolic fee of 1.50 euros per year plus VAT, which is used to support the tax that Apple imposes on such initiatives in order for them to be supported by iOS. The Core Technology Fee (CTF), a tax that is allegedly already under the European Union's lens, invites developers to pay Apple €0.50 for each first installation of their alternative marketplace and for each app installation exceeding one million in a year. An outlay that could push many to desist, attempting the path of political correctness with the App Store. In any case, there are only two apps in the Alt Store today: Delta and Clip. The first is an emulator of some historic Nintendo consoles (NES, SNES, N64) that allows you to play old games directly on iPhone and iPad. The second is a clipboard management app that goes far beyond the copy-and-paste possibilities of iPhones.

Here are the emulators.

If there are currently no real alternative app stores, despite the promise of an upcoming Epic Games Store and even a Microsoft Store Mobile, which could bring Xbox Games Pass gaming via the cloud to iOS, which is still incredibly absent, it is worth taking a look at emulators. Although unrelated to the effects of the DMA, the Cupertino giant's veto on publishing software that emulates video games of the past has been dropped. Delta is one example, but there are many others. Gamma is the new emulator that allows you to run games from the original PlayStation. It supports Apple-compatible gamepads and bluetooth keyboards as well as touch controls. It relies on Google Drive and Dropbox to synchronise game files and saves and, like the Delta emulator, automatically downloads the covers of detected titles. The concept of an emulator, in itself, is not illegal: the use of copies of games (Bios) that one does not own is, effectively shifting the burden of use to the user and not the developer.