Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years.

TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust .

A new way to play: Tears of the Kingdom can now sit on an iPhone's home screen as its own app, complete with an icon. A new open-source project called nxnative turns Switch games you own into native apps for iPhones and iPads. There's no emulator involved: each game's original code runs directly on Apple's chips. The same process can also create Mac apps.

This works because the Switch and Apple's recent devices both use Arm-based processors, meaning a game's instructions are already compatible with an iPhone's chip. PC ports like the recent AI-built Link's Awakening don't get that head start and must translate the code first, since most PCs use x86 processors.

On an iPhone or Mac, only the Nintendo-specific components need replacing.…