Apple Is Slowly Killing Everything We Love
Apple’s on a roll. First it was the removal of Launcher, the app that allowed you to launch apps (and even GBA4iOS games) via URL Scheme in Notification Center, and now our precious emulators found outside the App Store. Apple, it appears, is setting their eyes on the emulators community, starting by making the now-famous ’Date Trick’ completely obsolete in an upcoming update.
iOS 8.1 beta was seeded to developers yesterday and it’s already causing panic among some iOS emulator aficionados. It was reported to me almost immediately by a source that the date trick wasn’t helping at all in installing GBA4iOS 2.0 - that’s when worry started to set in and I decided to investigate.
The ’Date Trick' fuels the emulator communities nowadays. Our website, iEmulators.com, relies on this to continue distribution and updates. Without it, everything looks bleak. Without GBA4iOS 2.0, everything seems… well, not-fun. Will iOS 8.0.2 become our perpetual purgatory so that we can continue to enjoy these things?
Unsurprisingly so, this was a long-time coming; we knew this would one day arrive. After the ’Date Trick’ became famous earlier last year, our panic subsided and we learned to live a period of peace knowing that even though some of our favorite emulators’ certificates were revoked by Apple, we could still install these emulators by rolling our date back - many came to believe it was something that would last. Developers like Riley Testut didn’t lose any motivation knowing that their updates and hard work could still be acknowledged. Apple, it seems, had other plans.
It is still unconfirmed whether this a permanent thing come next beta update, but it all seems to spell one thing: Apple is slowly killing everything we love.
Oh cool the date trick to install GBA4iOS doesn’t work on iOS 8.1 awesome thanks Apple
— Riley Testut (@rileytestut)September 30, 2014
Dang, just as I feared. Date trick is dead on iOS 8.1. Let’s cross fingers it’s only this beta.
— Dario Sepulveda (@mithical)September 30, 2014
Update: iOS 8.1 Beta 2 is out and I can confirm that it continues to block the date trick for emulator installations. Well, I guess this is it, guys!
I’m not blind to the situation of copyrights and trademarks. I’m aware that Apple isn’t primarily at fault here (or that they are even specifically targeting the emulator community) - every year they grow more conscious of the smaller security holes and their mission is to perfect the system; I respect them for that. They’re probably also being pushed around by multiple copyright holders such as Nintendo (just an example) and are forced to act unless they want to face repercussions and be known for having a faulty security.
It’s a hard thing to live in the complicated, often misunderstood gray area of things and watch the things you love being killed. As of now, there is nothing we can do to prevent that but use what we have learned, try to adapt and move on.


