iOS port

[Markos-Th09]

Overview

I am working on porting Unleashed Recompiled to iOS. Since this is currently early stage I am opening this for feedback and evaluating the possibility of including this upstream. This is currently not in a mergeable state and is intended for technical review, testing, and collaborative debugging.

This also requires modifications to submodules. I am already working on upstreaming the changes to plume to make it compatible with iOS (renderbag/plume#102). However, for nativefiledialog-extended, it would be unlikely that this could be upstreamed or accepted as the current implementation is very much incomplete and mobile operating systems don't seem to be within the scope of the library. How should this be handled? I have identified the following options

1. Strip the iOS-specific NFD API implementation out of the submodule tree completely and compile it directly as part of this project's core source directories instead of linking against the actual NFD for iOS.
2. Fork nativefiledialog-extended and include these changes
3. Use an iOS specific implementation instead completely bypassing NFD

Known Blocking Issues

I have outlined all currently known in detail at my fork's issues page but to summarize:

• Synchronization issues in critical sections that cause deadlock and thread starvation issues specific only to iOS (Synchronization bugs in RtlEnterCriticalSection/RtlLeaveCriticalSection Markos-Th09/UnleashedRecomp#1)
• Broken depth buffer ([MoltenVK] The depth buffer is broken on iOS Markos-Th09/UnleashedRecomp#2)
  Update: It doesn't occur on the native Metal backend by squidbus (Add support for Metal on macOS. #1648)
• Major performance degradation compared to macOS (Major performance degradation compared to macOS Markos-Th09/UnleashedRecomp#3)

Compatibility

Since the game utilizes DXT/BC compressed textures, only very recent iOS devices natively support them. Specifically according to the Metal feature set tables:

• A17 Pro or later, A18-series or later (Apple9 Family GPUs or later)
• Apple M-series chips (M1, M2, M3, M4 or newer)

This corresponds to:

• iPhone 15 Pro / 15 Pro Max and newer
• iPhone 16 / 16 Plus / 16 Pro / 16 Pro Max / 16e and newer
• iPad mini (A17 Pro) and newer
• iPad Pro models with M-series chips (M1 / 11-inch 3rd gen / 12.9-inch 5th gen or newer)
• iPad Air models with M-series chips (M1 / 5th gen or newer)

The possibility of transcoding textures at installation time to another format like ASTC to improve compatibility could be considered in the future, but this adds significant complexity.

[Markos-Th09]

Will it have controller support, Xbox, Razer Kishi, GameSir?

Yes, the only way to play this currently is using either by connecting a controller or keyboard and mouse to your device.

[Markos-Th09]

I’m happy to announce the first playable release of this port intended for testing. You can download the IPA from the releases page of my fork. Anyone is welcome to report bugs and issues either here or in the issues page of the fork.

You WILL need a controller or mouse/keyboard to play this.

[ghost]

Which one do I download? I'm new here

[Markos-Th09]

Which one do I download? I'm new here

You can download Unleashed.ipa from here. Please note this is early stage so expect to find issues.
https://github.com/Markos-Th09/UnleashedRecomp/releases/tag/v1.0.3-beta%2Bios

[Markos-Th09]

Do you need a pc to get this working?

Have you sideloaded anything before? If you already know how to do that you don’t need a pc. In order not to fill this thread with unrelated things, you can message me on discord (MarkosTh09) for assistance or open a discussion in my fork.

[ghost]

Didn't I say I was new? Okay then lol

[yorgunkral31]

Tested this branch on real hardware — iPhone 16 Pro (A18 Pro), built with Xcode 27 on an M4 Pro, running the native Metal backend your branch integrates. Sharing everything we hit, in order, with fixes on this branch: https://github.com/yorgunkral31/UnleashedRecomp/tree/ios

Result: the game boots to the title screen on device with native Metal, and is stable enough at the menu that the idle attract intro plays. Repeat-launch stability testing is in progress. Update: repeated cold launches all reached the title screen cleanly — the boot deadlock is resolved by (3) below.

Findings & fixes

1. CMake configure fails on iOS — NFD requires AppKit (APPKIT_LIBRARY NOTFOUND). Per your open question in the PR description, went with option 3-ish: gated nativefiledialog-extended out of iOS builds entirely and stubbed the installer's picker with a message pointing at the Files app flow (UIFileSharingEnabled is already set): yorgunkral31/UnleashedRecomp@4f7b506

2. plume's Metal backend crashes on iOS hardware with -[AGXG17PDevice location]: unrecognized selector — MTLDevice.location and recommendedMaxWorkingSetSize are macOS-only selectors. Guards + iOS fallbacks: Guard macOS-only MTLDevice selectors for iOS renderbag/plume#115 (I believe this was the first time the native Metal path ran on iOS hardware — it works!)

3. The conservative guest sync implementation is dormant: nothing defines UNLEASHED_RECOMP_IOS_LAUNCHER anymore. Since the separate iOS launcher target was removed, no build path defines the macro, so iOS builds silently compile the atomic-wait paths — and we reproduced exactly the boot deadlocks from Synchronization bugs in RtlEnterCriticalSection/RtlLeaveCriticalSection Markos-Th09/UnleashedRecomp#1: a captured crash report shows 23 threads (main thread included) parked in Event::Wait, then the scene-update watchdog (0x8BADF00D) kills the app when it's backgrounded. Notably this reproduced on the native Metal backend, so the deadlock is backend-independent. One-line re-enable: yorgunkral31/UnleashedRecomp@b587800 — after this, boots have been clean. Happy to share the .ips files.

4. Xcode 27 / iOS 27 SDK note: builds with the current SDK trap at launch (EXC_BREAKPOINT in __UIApplicationEvaluateRuntimeIssueForNoSceneLifecycleAdoption) because SDL2 uses the legacy app-delegate lifecycle. Workaround we used: vtool -set-build-version ios 16.4 18.5 on the binary + re-sign. The real fix is UIScene adoption. Your older-SDK builds won't see this, but anyone building with current Xcode will hit it immediately.

5. Minor: MinimumOSVersion ends up empty in the built app's Info.plist (the template variable doesn't get filled); we set it manually before signing.

6. Still open on our side: two newRenderPipelineState failures at boot — Cannot convert attribute from MTLAttributeFormatUInt to float4 (iOS Metal is stricter than macOS about vertex attribute conversion). The game runs regardless; investigating which draws are affected.

Happy to turn any of this into PRs against your branch in whatever shape is useful, and to run more on-device tests — this is a fantastic base. (Credit also to @squidbus for the Metal backend.)