When the first Apple TV with tvOS and App Store was introduced in 2015, Apple tried to promote it as a kind of game console. However, years have passed and the catalog of games available for tvOS is quite small. While Apple TV isn’t exactly a super popular product like the iPhone, a specific tvOS restriction could be the main reason why game developers stay away from the platform.

tvOS limits how much storage apps can use

With Apple now allowing game emulators on the App Store, many users have been wondering when one of these emulators would become available on the tvOS App Store for Apple TV users. That finally happened last week with the launch of RetroArch.

However, users who have tested RetroArch on Apple TV have noticed that their games are suddenly being deleted by the app. Unfortunately for these people, this is not a bug in the app, but a limitation of the operating system. More specifically, Apple limits how much storage each tvOS app can use.

“The maximum size for a tvOS app bundle 4 GB. Moreover, your app can only access 500 KB of persistent storage that is local to the device,” the App Store documentation reads. You read that right: Apple TV apps can only permanently store 500 KB of data, which is only enough for things like settings and save games.

The thing is, tvOS apps can download more data, but the system can delete them at any time because they’re all considered temporary files. Of course, the 4 GB limit for an app bundle is also quite low for console-level games.

Game and emulator developers are not happy about this

As noted by AppleInsider, many developers have been complaining about the limitations of tvOS when it comes to storage usage.

“It’s unacceptable IMO that tvOS apparently doesn’t allows apps to use persistent storage. For instance, the new RetroArch game emulator has to store all your savegames, screenshots, ROMs in the Caches directory, which the OS may purge at any time without warning,” said developer Ole Begemann.

Riley Testut, the developer behind the popular Delta emulator, said that such a limitation is the biggest reason why he hasn’t created an Apple TV version of his emulator. And it’s not hard to imagine that many other game developers have also given up on bringing their games to Apple TV because of this.

It’s not hard to imagine why the company created this limitation in the first place, since older Apple TV models started with 32GB of storage. However, Apple TV now starts with 64GB of storage and there’s also a 128GB option. Hopefully Apple will remove this limitation in the future, at least for the latest Apple TV models.

Read also