I’ll preface this by noting that this in now way a practical thing to do, but it could be interesting.
Today at their new features announcement event, Apple introduced MacOS Sequoia, which, among other things, allows you to use your iPhone on your MacBook. Essentially, your iPhone is displayed on the screen of your Mac and you can interact with all the apps. Would this theoretically work with Infinite Flight?
If it works the same way as it does on Android/Windows, yes. I’m not sure doing it is officially supported, but you can use Infinite Flight in this way.
I’ve been able to connect joysticks to my PC, then connect my Android device to the PC, and use the joystick with Infinite Flight, making it much more accessible and easier. Just to name something.
Me being extremely excited for WWDC! All jokes aside, I think that this would definitely be a game changing feature, especially with Game Mode. As we who watched the WWDC know, you can play games for iPad on Mac and Apple makes it easy to transfer your game. I mean, Apple makes it sound as extremely easy. If it’s actually that easy, maybe the devs could just make some adjustments for it to run on Mac.
Now this in theory would work, but you have to consider the latency. Even playing Fortnite on my Mac (2022 M2) it lags, and it only has to connect to the server. Think of playing Infinite Flight. It’s already laggy enough on its own. Add to that the connection to the IF servers. You could get violations if the game lags. Just this Sunday, I was taxiing and went through the runway with out clearance due to the game lag from my joystick. (I didn’t get a violation cause there was no controller active)
Even if in theory it would work, it’s still not the same. Namely, it doesn’t matter if Infinite Flight runs natively on the Mac or if it is transnlated from another device, the problem is in the interaction with the UI, which is designed for touch input. All I managed to do running IF natively (which of course is not officially supported) is to use apple’s built-in touch replacement that emulates a gamepad and gyroscope, so you can assign 2 axes and a couple buttons (like 3 in total), for example to camera zoom. All other interaction is just using the mouse. Connecting an external joystick didn’t solve these problems either for me. (I should also add that it is possible to emulate touch input through a trackpad, but I don’t have one)
Overall, if it would be possible to use a mouse from a Mac and touch input from an iPhone + its gyroscope for flying, it would probably be usable, lol