Under heat from antitrust regulators, Apple loosened up its restrictions on third-party apps for the App Store recently. But zany developers can evidently push Apple a little too far.
That’s the case with iDOS, an app that appeared this week on the App Store. Within a day, the 99 cent version of the DOSbox software vanished. But for a brief time, joyful geeks were capturing screenshots of old Microsoft DOS games running. DOS, or disk operating system, was a character-based operating system that Microsoft used for many years before switching to Windows.
The gleeful retro hackers had a field day, capturing screen shots of old games such as Space Quest, Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls, and a couple of my favorites: The 7th Guest and Warcraft II. They even put Windows 3.0, Microsoft’s operating system from the early 1990s, on iDOS.
iDOS is based on an open source DOS emulator, or a program that makes software from one machine run on another machine with different underlying software. Fast Intelligence created the app. Apple didn’t give a reason for pulling the app. But it has stated in the past that apps can’t execute code from within, out of concern about malware. An app that emulated the Commodore 64 computer was also removed.
It seems if you jam enough Microsoft software into an Apple device, it rejects it and spits it out. Apple pulled the app, but it is now available as an app for jailbroken phones. Jailbreaking violates Apple’s guidelines, but the Copyright Office recently ruled that it’s OK for consumers to create their own jailbreaking software under fair use considerations, as long as they’re not making a commercial profit from it.
Apps such as this one show that Apple will likely have less and less control of what appears on its devices in the future. It also shows there’s a strong retro urge out there. If someone figures out how to cash in on it, they could make a bundle.
Below is a video of the app in action.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wzOM-bjrO0&w=640&h=390]