Is it not possible to emulate phones in the same manner?
The two most ready examples of this sort of thing are that (I think) 32 bit apps aren't supported any more, and that the HID guidelines specified the fixed pixel dimensions that iphones were. That isn't something you can assume any more.
But if I want to run an ancient version of flappy bird, I don't really need it to run on my modern iphone - just like I don't need modern windows to support 1991 QBASIC in order to run my old qbasic programs from when I was a kid. We need two things:
- Access to old versions of iOS app binaries. I have no idea how to get these, if they're available anywhere in the app store (or can be backed up), or if apple deletes them.
- Access to an early iOS simulator / emulator to run those apps on. Apple has had fantastic iOS simulators going all the way back to the first app store releases, though I think they only ran ios apps compiled to x86.
It'd be great if there was a way to run old ios games and apps and things. I don't want those heady days of early ios apps to be lost to history.
The switch to App Stores and the too fragmented OS updates made everything just a mess like this
I was running an arm laptop, emulating a modern x86_64 chip, emulating an old i386 chip, interpreting a qbasic program unmodified from 30 years ago. Sound, graphics modes, input events - all of it worked perfectly. I didn’t try running it on windows, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it just worked there too without even needing dosbox.
Backwards compatibility on phones is a joke. Decades of phone software is totally lost to history, impossible to download or run anywhere.
The web isn’t much better because old websites go down. But at least modern browsers will still happily render webpages from the 90s just fine.