Apple has blocked Microsoft and Google’s game streaming services from the App Store, so both companies will launch them as web apps instead. But what is a web app anyway? Is it just a website? Is it fast enough for games?
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Google's Stadia and Microsoft's xCloud let you play games via "remote control." The games actually run on powerful servers in the cloud and stream the video. The local app acts as a portal to display the video and send your controller commands to the cloud.
But Apple has blocked game streaming services like this from the App Store. These apps offer a range of games in a kind of app store, and that's something Apple doesn't like. So Microsoft and Google make them web apps.
"Web apps don't have the ability to cache large files locally," Brent Brookler, CEO of cloud presentation software developer FlowVella, told Lifewire via Twitter. "Native apps work offline, and everything can be faster if large and small files are local, even on fast networks."
