MS-DOS game emulation app is back on Apple devices after 3 years

The list of great iPhone emulators only continues to grow following new EU regulations, and the latest is iDOS 3, which can help you play MS-DOS games on your iPhone or iPad.

Developer Chaoji Li announced the app’s approval late last week after months of struggling with the App Store submission process.

“It has been a long wait for common sense to prevail within Apple,” Li wrote in a blog post. “As much as I want to celebrate, I still can’t help being a little bit cautious about the future. Are we good from now on?”

iDOS is a long-running app that creates a nostalgic environment via DOSBox where you can run DOS games and actually interact with them via touch and an on-screen keyboard and trackpad. It had been 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 was after Li added file-sharing access, a long-requested feature.

“The bottom line is that I can not bring myself to cut the critical functionalities of iDOS 2 in order to be compliant with Apple’s policy,” Li wrote at the time. “That would be a betrayal to all the users that have purchased this app specifically for those features.”

Then the EU regulations kicked in, so Li decided to have another go. iDOS 3 — which is mostly similar to iDOS 2 but under a new name — was submitted to the store in April, but rejected a couple of times. First, it was rejected as a copycat and then again because it wasn’t emulating a console.

UTM, an open-source PC emulator, went through many of the same issues before the team was able to successfully list UTM SE, an overall slower version, on the App Store. That victory encouraged Li to try again.

So for now, iDOS 3 is available to buy for iPhones and iPads for just $1.