This tvOS restriction retains recreation builders away from Apple TV

When the primary Apple TV with tvOS and App Retailer was launched in 2015, Apple tried to put it up for sale as a type of recreation console. Nevertheless, years have handed and the catalog of video games accessible for tvOS is kind of small. Whereas Apple TV isn’t precisely a brilliant common product just like the iPhone, a particular tvOS restriction could possibly be the primary cause why recreation builders steer clear of the platform.

tvOS limits how a lot storage apps can use

With Apple now permitting recreation emulators on the App Retailer, many customers have been questioning when certainly one of these emulators would grow to be accessible on the tvOS App Retailer for Apple TV customers. That lastly occurred final week with the launch of RetroArch.

Nevertheless, customers who’ve examined RetroArch on Apple TV have seen that their video games are immediately being deleted by the app. Sadly for these individuals, this isn’t a bug within the app, however a limitation of the working system. Extra particularly, Apple limits how a lot storage every tvOS app can use.

“The utmost measurement for a tvOS app bundle 4 GB. Furthermore, your app can solely entry 500 KB of persistent storage that’s native to the system,” the App Retailer documentation reads. You learn that proper: Apple TV apps can solely completely retailer 500 KB of knowledge, which is just sufficient for issues like settings and save video games.

The factor is, tvOS apps can obtain extra knowledge, however the system can delete them at any time as a result of they’re all thought of short-term recordsdata. After all, the 4 GB restrict for an app bundle can also be fairly low for console-level video games.

Sport and emulator builders are usually not pleased about this

As famous by AppleInsider, many builders have been complaining in regards to the limitations of tvOS relating to storage utilization.

“It’s unacceptable IMO that tvOS apparently doesn’t permits apps to make use of persistent storage. As an illustration, the brand new RetroArch recreation emulator has to retailer all of your savegames, screenshots, ROMs within the Caches listing, which the OS could purge at any time with out warning,” mentioned developer Ole Begemann.

Riley Testut, the developer behind the common Delta emulator, mentioned that such a limitation is the largest cause why he hasn’t created an Apple TV model of his emulator. And it’s not onerous to think about that many different recreation builders have additionally given up on bringing their video games to Apple TV due to this.

It’s not onerous to think about why the corporate created this limitation within the first place, since older Apple TV fashions began with 32GB of storage. Nevertheless, Apple TV now begins with 64GB of storage and there’s additionally a 128GB choice. Hopefully Apple will take away this limitation sooner or later, not less than for the newest Apple TV fashions.

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