TL;DR
- We are pausing our Patreon for now. Existing Patrons will not be billed for the next months.
- We will announce if and when billing is resuming at a later date.
- Once Patreon will resume, we will no longer post Patreon-exclusive content (with exception to the Windows tool for release at a later date). The practice of releasing beta builds to Patreon has been discontinued.
- We are taking a break from the project but expect to return at a later date.
- DolphiniOS is not dead.
Long Version
Hey, everyone.
We would just like to let everyone know that we are discontinuing our practice of distributing Patreon beta builds. We’d also like to give you an update on DolphiniOS development past version 3.1.0.
First, we will be taking a break for the foreseeable future. OatmealDome already announced this on Twitter, but we believe it would be prudent to mention it here as well.
About Patreon
There are several reasons as to why we have decided to pause Patreon for the time being, though most of them are personal.
We’d like to mention just two.
The primary reason is that won’t be able to push out new builds in a timely manner at this point in time. The lead developer going on a break will prevent us from doing this, though it would still be difficult to release builds even if he didn’t. In addition, there are more important responsibilities (both real life and virtual) that we must pay attention to. 3.1.0 spent several months in beta because of this, which is much longer than we would’ve liked. Not all of the features that we wanted to implement were able to make it into the final build as well. The public release was also pushed back a few times, and we are very sorry for this.
Second, emulator Patreons are controversial. We realize that some are not approving of our practices, despite our strict adherence to the Dolphin license (GPLv2+). We really do not want to upset or deliberately antagonize people, so this only made the decision to halt beta builds at this time easier.
As such, the “OatmealDome & Simon” Patreon page will be paused when this post goes public. Existing Patrons will not be billed for the entire month of November, and billing will likely not resume this year. We will announce on Patreon if and when we will resume billing. Please take this time to cancel your membership if you do not wish to continue supporting us past this date. If you wish to receive a refund for the month of October, please contact us over Patreon messages.
There is no planned Patreon-exclusive DolphiniOS content past November (we are still committed to the Windows PC tool that has been mentioned in the past, but it is unknown when it will release), though we may decide to post smaller things in the future.
The Future of DolphiniOS
Due to many reasons, we will not be able to make updates and maintain the project in the meantime.
However, DolphiniOS updates and maintenance will continue at some point, albeit at a significantly slower pace. We do not know when we will have sufficient time to create new features, nor do we know when updates will be released. If you are a developer, feel free to contribute to the project on GitHub. We are essentially a two-man team with occasional contributions from outsiders, so any pull requests are welcome.
Just to make it clear: The project is not dead. We are committed to maintaining DolphiniOS for both jailbroken and non-jailbroken devices, as long as they are on iOS versions that make it possible to run the emulator.
(Apple is already making it extremely difficult to run DolphiniOS on iOS 14 for non-jailbroken devices, and we don’t expect it to get any easier. Jailbroken devices, on the other hand, will effectively always be able to run DolphiniOS because of their jailbroken nature.)
Conclusion
Never in our wildest dreams would we have imagined that this project would’ve blown up like it did. It really has changed our lives, and we’ll always be grateful anyone who has tried out DolphiniOS, Patron or not.
Thank you very much for your support.