An Apple event staple is the famous game dev gushing over new Apple hardware, followed by a tease of upcoming high-end titles. But with last year’s iPhone 15 Pro and again with this year’s iPhone 16 Pro, Apple raised the stakes, boldly claiming its smartphone lets you play your favorites anywhere—including the biggest AAA hits.
How far can you really push the iPhone as a video game system? We decided to find out. Consoles and PCs were tidied away. Then, armed with only an iPhone, a few choice accessories, and steely resolve, we explored whether Apple’s gaming hype is real and what it means for the future of mobile gaming.
Playing AAA Games on iPhone
Apple might claim the iPhone is a AAA powerhouse, but when playing the current crop of headliners—Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Death Stranding, Resident Evil Village—you find they have one thing in common: The AAA experience has come across too literally.
These games first demand you download many gigabytes of data, and you can’t do anything with your iPhone while it’s chugging away. Most forget touchscreens exist, forcing you to navigate menus using on-screen gamepads, and controls are strewn across the display. Even if you’re a finger gymnastics champ, you’ll cover half the action while you play.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage makes the best effort to optimize for touch, but it’s still far from ideal. So a controller is a must. Using one has the added benefit of keeping your hands clear of your iPhone, which can get toasty as you play.
With the iPhone ensconced in a controller, it then hits you: You’re playing a modern AAA game. On a phone. And in the case of Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Resident Evil 4, games that jumped from console to iPhone in just eight months. We’re a long way from Angry Birds.
A long way from consoles, too. Visually, these titles look great—for iPhone games. Compared to their console and PC counterparts, you notice softness in the visuals. The output is 720p, but it’s being upscaled from something lower. That means a lack of clarity, lower-quality textures, missing lighting effects, and artifacts around characters as reconstruction wizardry fails to keep up. It’s impressive, but not a PlayStation 5 (or even a PS4) in your pocket.
The same goes for performance—although Apple is making strides there. Run these games on an iPhone 15 Pro and they are playable, but quite often dip below 30 fps. With an iPhone 16 Pro, frame rates are more stable. Maybe there’s something to those Apple keynote performance claims after all.
Consider the Costs
Wow factor aside, is this enough? You can play these games on other systems, so why use an iPhone? That’s a good question. Especially since various parties keep adding reasons not to. Capcom’s games now require an internet connection, rendering them useless on flights. Assassin’s Creed Mirage won’t even start without a Ubisoft account.
Then there’s the iPhone hardware. Every iPhone 16 has 8 GB of RAM, yet that’s cutting it close for the most demanding titles and can lead to crashes. Even if that doesn’t happen, your battery will rapidly drain while playing AAA games. Running out of juice on a Steam Deck or a Switch is frustrating; it’s much worse when your iPhone dies by midafternoon because you spent an hour on the train beating up zombies.
There are associated costs as well. These games are priced more like console games than iPhone games. Death Stranding is $40, although it is a universal app, which means your single purchase works on a Mac too (and with superior performance). But Assassin’s Creed Mirage is $50 and a long-awaited Mac port appears lost in the desert. Also, Death Stranding downloads close to 50 GB of data as you progress, and even “lightweight” AAA titles need 15 GB. Not ideal if you’ve a 128 GB iPhone. Apple would argue you can offload games and retain their data, but you won’t want to download dozens of GB every time you want to play.
Dig Into the App Store
Gripes aside, these releases remain objectively fun, even if they sit awkwardly between tech demo and something you’d actually want to play on a phone. It’s worth remembering, however, that they aren’t the first AAA efforts to make it to iPhone. Several publishers—most notably, Feral—have been bringing PC games to iPhone for years, and they’re often more suited to the hardware, because they’re less demanding.
Grid Autosport launched on PS3 and PC in 2014 and came to iOS three years later. It remains a great racer and works well on iPhone due to Feral’s optimized port. (The 2022 follow-up Grid Legends is due in December.) The 2018 PC release Wreckfest is now two years old on iPhone—and runs at 60 fps on the latest iPhone Pro. (Capcom’s recent Resident Evil 7 port benefits in a similar way.) These titles are also cheaper (usually $10 or less) and require less storage.
In fact, we’d argue the iPhone’s gaming strength stems from its rich back catalog rather than from shiny new toys. So while it might not replace your current-gen console, your iPhone can complement it as you explore older AAA titles—or the countless indies that originated on the platform. Much has been written about iPhone gaming having a reputation for junk prior to the current crop of AAA titles. That’s nonsense. There are plenty of great games if you know where to look.
Try All-You-Can-Eat Subscriptions
That said, you might not want to dig through App Store dross to find gems. Subscriptions provide a handy shortcut. Apple Arcade gets flak and rapidly ditched efforts to be the HBO of mobile gaming when it pivoted to engagement and retention. Yet plenty of quality remains, such as Balatro, What the Car?, and Shovel Knight Dig. Netflix has also built a quality mobile catalog that now includes Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, Hades, and remasters of Grand Theft Auto and World of Goo.
When you want to move beyond mobile games and ports, try streaming. Xbox Cloud Gaming works well as a progressive web app saved from Safari to your Home Screen, giving you access to a rotating list of quality titles. Focusing on the other end of gaming history, Antstream Arcade (available on the App Store) combines retro games, worldwide high-score tables, and fun challenges. Both services require a solid, fast internet connection and—surprisingly—make an effort with touchscreen controls, even if the games they house were resolutely designed with a controller in mind (and are better played with one).
Emulation is another option for classic games, and received a boost when Apple in 2024 dropped its rule banning emulators from loading external files. This has resulted in several quality emulators appearing on the App Store, including Delta, PPSSPP, and RetroArch. Just be mindful that the emulation ecosystem lags far behind Android’s, in part due to remaining Apple restrictions making it impossible to emulate much hardware beyond the original PlayStation. Although if you’re old enough, that might be a blessing.
‘Consolize’ Your iPhone
So an iPhone can, to varying degrees, replace consoles from the PS5 back to the Atari 2600. But can it be a console? Apple had all the component parts of an “anywhere” console long before the Switch—Apple TV, AirPlay, cross-device game sync—but never connected the dots.
It still hasn’t entirely. Beyond native Apple TV titles (which, these days, mostly means Apple Arcade), you can mirror your screen to an Apple TV—or plug and (hopefully) play using a USB-C to HDMI cable or HDMI dock for a more robust experience. But there are shortcomings when mirroring an iPhone display.
Black borders abound. The distracting Home indicator is often present. There’s no landscape Home Screen nor any means to launch games using a controller. Button labels don’t always match the controller you use. You may suffer from a touch of lag. We found the best console-like experience actually comes from Delta—ironic, given that Apple for years rejected it. In part, this is because Delta uses the TV as a proper second screen rather than mirroring, which means no black borders.
The thing is, this should be the rule, not the exception. Worse, many of our gripes extend beyond the “console” experience anyway, impacting iPhone gaming in all gaming setups. We’ve lost count of how many titles don’t make allowances for Dynamic Island, the Home indicator, or even the iPhone display’s curved corners. This leaves the platform as having lashings of potential but a wider gaming experience that’s frustratingly incomplete.
So: Is the iPhone Good for Games?
Where does this leave us? Can the iPhone replace your consoles? Kind of. The hardware is powerful and convenient. There are strong ecosystems in accessories and games. While the iPhone 16 Pro only just copes with the latest AAA games, performance will improve as developers optimize titles and Apple iterates its hardware. Of course, that assumes momentum continues and AAA developers don’t abandon the platform.
Key to all this is whether Apple has the will, enthusiasm and love for games at the highest levels to make gaming a priority, rather than a way to show off how powerful its silicon is during a keynote. The current evidence suggests … maybe? Apple courting AAA developers and talking about gaming more regularly are promising signs. However, the lack of addressing low-hanging fruit, AAA hype clashing with reality, and Apple failing to provide a complete gaming experience threaten to undermine the progress that’s been made.
So Apple is slowly getting there with AAA. There are enough other quality titles on the platform to keep you occupied for years. And with a controller, your iPhone can be a great little video game machine—but your PlayStation 5 and PC have nothing to fear just yet.
Shopping List
Got the taste for iPhone gaming? You’ll need some of these.
iPhone 16 Pro (from $999): If you want AAA, a 15 Pro isn’t enough. A 16 might be. A 16 Pro does the business (just about). Don’t go under 256GB storage if you want to install a lot of games.
GameSir GameSir G8 Galileo ($80): The star of iPhone game controllers, with a comfy full-size grip, a pivoting USB-C port for easily connecting your iPhone, headphone and pass-through charging ports, and quality controls—including L4 and R4.
Backbone One ($100): The former iPhone controller champ—and still a contender if you need something more portable than the GameSir. The second-generation device adds magnetic adapters for a better phone fit.
Apple TV 4K (from $129): This little black box reeks of unfulfilled gaming potential, but it’s a solid buy if you get heavily into Apple Arcade, or are keen to send iPhone games to a bigger screen.
PlayStation DualSense controller ($75): Or an Xbox Wireless Controller ($60). Or even a PS4 DualShock if you want to go old school. But you’ll need one of them to “consolize” your iPhone.
Anker Nylon USB-C to HDMI 4K cable ($26): Plug one end of this quality six-foot cable into your iPhone and the other end into your TV. You’ll then get up to 4K resolution at up to 60 Hz.
Anker 553 USB-C Hub ($54): Mirror footage to a TV screen and power your iPhone at the same time. Plus two USB ports let you plug in SSDs full of old games when messing around with RetroArch.
