Starting today, we will start offering nightly versions of RetroArch for iOS and tvOS on our buildbot!
In the past, harakari would grace us every month with a pre-compiled version that we then had to manually upload to our buildserver. Now, it’s fully automated, so both iOS and tvOS versions of RetroArch will be built with each nightly and stable cycle!
Where to get it
Our Downloads page links to the latest nightlies for iOS/Apple TV.
The iOS version requires you to have iOS 11 or later installed.
How to install
Installing sideloaded apps on iOS and tvOS devices is a bit more complicated than it is on Macs. If you want to use the binaries on our site, this is what you have to do:
Get a Apple Developer Certificate
Apple asks about $100 per year for individuals. You will then have to re-sign the .ipa file that you download from our site. You can read more on how to do this here.
NOTE: You can use the program https://github.com/xndrs/XReSign on your Mac to re-sign as well, just to list another option.
We’d like to be able to provide a more easy and convenient way to install RetroArch on iOS/tvOS in a legal way in a manner we approve of (no ads, no monetization, etc.).
iOS/tvOS notes
No Core Installer – The Core Downloader is useless for these versions. It will likely be hidden/removed altogether in the future since it currently serves no purpose as cores also need to be individually codesigned.
First-time asset extraction – On first startup, it will extract the assets from assets.zip. You will notice it starting up with low-res assets and telling you to wait until this process has finished. Fortunately, this will only happen once and will not happen again afterwards.
How many cores available at launch?
There should be over 84+ cores available for iOS and tvOS. Just like the ARM Mac version, we are far from done here, and you’ll see this core library rapidly expand as we add more and more cores.
More ARM Mac cores added
In the meantime, we have added even more cores for the ARM Macs. We are now up to 93 cores, up from the 75 we started with a few days ago!
