The list of great iPhone emulators keeps growing due to new EU regulations. The latest emulator is iDOS 3, which allows you to play MS-DOS games on your iPhone or iPad.
Developer Chaoji Li announced the app’s approval late last week after struggling for months with the App Store submission process.
“It’s taken a long time for common sense to prevail at Apple,” Li wrote in a blog post. “As much as I want to celebrate, I still can’t help but be a little cautious about the future. Are we OK from here on out?”
iDOS is a long-running app that creates a nostalgic environment through DOSBox where you can run DOS games and actually interact with them via touch and an on-screen keyboard and trackpad. It was available on the App Store for years until it was removed in 2021 because, according to Li, it violated guidelines that apps should be “self-contained” and not launch “executable code.” This came after Li added file-sharing access, a long-requested feature.
“The bottom line is that I cannot bring myself to cut critical features from iDOS 2 to comply with Apple’s guidelines,” Li wrote at the time. “That would be a betrayal to all users who bought this app specifically for those features.”
Then EU regulations came into force and Li decided to try again. iDOS 3 – which is largely similar to iDOS 2 but has a new name – was added to the store in April but was rejected several times. First it was rejected as a copycat and then again because it didn’t emulate a console.
UTM, an open-source PC emulator, had many of the same problems before the team successfully launched UTM SE, an overall slower version, on the App Store. This success encouraged Li to try again.
Therefore, iDOS 3 is currently available for just $1 for iPhones and iPads.
