Thanks for visiting FlightSimX. Did you know you can subscribe to our RSS feed, which will deliver the latest flight simulator news direct to your newsreader, or sign up to our daily email summary?
Also, why not take a look at our shop, where you'll find the latest flight simulation hardware and software?
X-Plane’s creator - Austin Meyer - has published a detailed response to many requests for an iPhone version of X-Plane.
As Austin explains, it won’t be happening in the short term, but who knows what the future may bring?
A number of people have suggested that X-Plane could be a fascinating port to the iPhone.
I am sorry to say, but I do NOT see this as a possibility.
The screen size, lack of mouse and keyboard, and inability to plug in peripherals, combined with certain CPU and RAM and video card limitations that I cannot discuss specifically simply do NOT make it feasible for us to port as advanced a program as X-Plane to such a device.
Now, don’t get me wrong: With the accelerometers in the iPhone which can detect which way the phone is TILTED, it would be VERY fun to tilt the phone around in your hands to fly the plane! As well, the little displays on the iPhone and iPodTouch are so bright, crisp, and hi-res that X-Plane imagery would look just WONDERFUL on such devices!
As well, the lure of being able to hold something as small as an iPodTouch or iPhone in your hands, watching the X-Plane world zoom by on the little screen as you tilt your phone to fly through touch and gos, take-offs and landings, and zooming through the terrain of Innsbruck would be very attractive to many… are you stuck in the back of an airliner for 2 hours with your iPhone on you, wishing you were flying instead of being stuck back in coach? NO PROBLEM! You could pull out your little iPhone or iPodTouch and fly X-Plane right in your seat, tilting the phone around to fly the plane!
So, I am very sorry to say that due to various technical reasons I cannot get into here, we do NOT think it is possible to actually DO such a port, so we will have to settle for running X-Plane on our big, bulky laptops when we travel for the foreseeable future.
It is a nice idea, though… a VERY fascinating idea, so let’s hope that at SOME POINT in the future these little devices get strong enough to run a sim like X-Plane! I will let you know when this happens for sure, and port a mini version of X-Plane to that device for sure! (Though it will still be quite a few years before this happens, according to our best projections, so please do NOT expect this any time soon).
Update: It seems this was Austin’s idea of a joke! Well, it was a pretty good one, cos I fell for it 
Anyway, there really IS an iPhone version of X-Plane. You can read the announcement here and a review here.
Related posts
{ 1 trackback }
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Lowell Denning 09.12.08 at 8:38 pm
Just curious buy why has X Plane 9 for iPhone just appeared on the App Store for $9.99??
arparp 09.13.08 at 1:06 am
What the heck, there’s x-plane for iPhone in the app store right now marked as posted on the 11th. Did this really get posted on the 10th!?
Jeremy 09.13.08 at 1:53 am
I guess he got it working sooner, rather than later? http://www.slidetoplay.com/story/x-plane-9-first-look
mark.avey 09.13.08 at 9:53 am
LOL! That must the quickest turnaround from “it can’t be done” to being released in the history of software development!
mark.avey 09.13.08 at 10:05 am
Here’s a link to the official announcement - http://www.flightsimx.co.uk/xplane/x-plane-released-on-iphone/