Last week, the world of iOS changed. Due to a change in Apple's policy, retro game emulators began to launch and really take hold.

The launch and subsequent success of the Delta emulator made people wonder if the beloved GameCube and Wii emulator DolphiniOS (a popular fork of Dolphin) could make its way to Apple's mobile platform. Unfortunately, according to the app's developer (via 9To5Mac), it doesn't appear to be happening.

"Apple still won't let us use a key technology that Dolphin needs to run with good performance: the JIT," the developer said in a blog post. [The GameCube and Wii have PowerPC-based CPUs. All recent Apple devices use ARM-based CPUs; you cannot run PowerPC code directly on an ARM CPU. Therefore, if you want to run a GameCube or Wii game on your iPhone, you must convert the game's PowerPC code to ARM so that the CPU can understand it."

Just-in-time (JIT) is necessary to avoid the conversion from PowerPC-based to ARM-based CPUs. Without it, running DolphiniOS seems impossible. Unless other developers come up with a miraculous solution, no other GameCube or Wii emulators are likely to appear in the App Store.

"Dolphin uses what is called a just-in-time (JIT) recompiler to accomplish this. Whenever the emulated console wants to run game code, Dolphin uses the JIT to convert the PowerPC code to ARM and runs the result," the developer explains.

This is not due to a lack of effort on the part of the DolphiniOS team. Regarding attempts to gain access to JIT support, "We submitted a DMA interoperability request to Apple for JIT support, but Apple denied that request several weeks ago.

At this time, with no direct comment from Apple, it is difficult to know why the company would not allow JIT; DolphiniOS developers have stated that "it is possible that they consider it a security risk."

The developers admit that it is technically possible to run DolphiniOS without JIT thanks to an interpreter that executes PowerPC code. However, performance is significantly reduced. In fact, as shown in the video below, performance is so poor that even the top-of-the-line iPhone 15 Pro Max can barely play games.

"You could submit DolphiniOS as an interpreter only to the App Store, but you would get endless complaints from users about the poor performance, and App Review might even reject your app because it is unusable," the developer concludes his blog. The developer concluded his blog by stating, "We've already had a lot of complaints about poor performance," dashing the hopes of Gamecube and Wii fans around the world.

Another potential problem could come from Apple's requirement that emulators on the App Store be considered retro. One could argue that the GameCube is a retro console, but it would be a stretch to say that the Wii, which was introduced in 2006, is retro.