Apple macOS 11.3 or greater (via browser). Any devices with the following browsers: Edge, Safari, and Chrome. It was the name of the public technology preview for cloud gaming that began in September 2019. Cloud Gaming Beta. That's how Microsoft refer to the service on his website. Microsoft now supports xCloud game streaming on web browsers, including Safari. Shortly before E3, Microsoft announced plans to expand xCloud game streaming to browsers, and today that update went. Amazon's EC2 service offers a variety of Linux and Windows OS choices, but I haven't found a service offering a similar 'rent by the hour' service for a remote Mac OS X virtual machine.

Update 12/09/20: Microsoft has officially announced that its Xbox cloud gaming service will come to iOS and PC in spring 2021. This story has been updated to reflect the official announcement.

Microsoft has been stymied by Apple’s rules for the App Store, which all but prohibit the company from bringing its Xbox game streaming service to iOS devices. The company has updated the Xbox app to let you stream games from your own Xbox on the same local network, but you won’t be able to stream games from Microsoft’s cloud servers.

With the App Store rules requiring Microsoft to list every single streaming game as a separate App Store release with its own ratings and download and icons and so on, how could Microsoft possibly end up on your iPhone or iPad?

The answer is: by avoiding Apple’s ecosystem in favor of the open web. Much like Amazon’s Luna gaming service, Microsoft will build a web-based solution that gamers can access on their iOS devices.

While Apple likely views this as a victory—proof that its policies do not prevent such services from being enjoyed on its devices—it’s really just more evidence that Apple’s platform is too restrictive for some developers and services, and requiring the use of less-ideal and customer-friendly web apps, where other platforms get native apps.

I write software for Windows. Exclusively for Windows. These days, VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop are two very mature virtualization products that allow clients to run virtually any Windows software on the Mac. Right now I have a client reporting an issue under VMWare Fusion 5. It’s an important client, so I’d better support him. My options to reproduce the issue are to buy a Mac Mini, or try out a virtual mac hosting service.

I need the following things

• Root access. I need to install the software I want to test, including VMWare Fusion.
• OS X Mavericks. I need the latest version of the operating system.

I’m reviewing these services based on my needs of occasional full speed access for testing. If you’re after a dedicated server for an application like web hosting, you will have different needs than I have.

Here’s a list of all of the services that I could find offering roughly the kind of service I’m looking for.

Some of these services offer cheaper plans with a more limited feature set (e.g. no root access). I’ve chosen in most cases to review the cheapest plan that offers Mavericks and that offers root access to your VM.

I had every intention of trying out xcodeclub, vmosx and xcloud. However due to time constraints I ended up testing xcloud only.

xcloud is an offering from innofield who also provide the “Flow App Engine” (flow.ch).

Three plans are offered, all include Mavericks and root access. The cheapest one (“mini”) is 79 CHF, which is USD $~85/month at today’s exchange rates. For that you get 80gb storage, 2gb RAM, and 2 x 2.3GHz CPU cores.
No trial offered, but I asked for a 1 week trial via their contact form anyway. They were happy to oblige. I’ll be trailing a “pro” instance with 160gb storage, 4gb RAM and 4 virtual CPU cores.

From the customer console, I am able to start and stop the virtual instance.

API Capabilities

Xbox Cloud Gaming Iphone

A support engineer was kind enough to explain some of the capabilities of the snapshot API.

This is just as powerful as AWS or Azure, but it’s for Macs! Brilliant.

This API seems to be undocumented, I expect that this is a work in progress and that we’ll see more of this soon.

Documentation

Xcloud provides excellent documentation for some of the basics. The getting started guide covers every operating system you might consider connecting from. Some of the more common problems you might expect to encounter are well documented.

Connecting to the Instance

I imagine if you’re connecting from a Mac in the first place, this whole thing goes much smoother.

Right from the console, there’s a button to launch an HTML5 VNC client. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the HTML5 client to work. I tried Chrome, IE and Firefox. I got this error in every case.

I was able to connect just fine with TightVNC, however. My experience was pretty slow, but I attribute this to my own ADSL connection rather than anything to do with xcloud. This was just painfully slow.

To resolve this, the Xcloud documentation suggests installing TeamViewer. So I started an AWS windows instance, RDPd to it, installed TightVNC there, VNCd to the xcloud instance (RDP-to-AWS-to-VNC-to-xcloud is actually reasonably fast), installed TeamViewer, then connected via TeamViewer. Phew! Happily, this all works just fine.

The only improvement to this would be if xcloud installed TeamViewer by default. VNC from Windows is just too slow.

Testing

Network connection seems more than acceptable. I was able to download a 4gb ISO from MSDN in less than 20 minutes.

Xbox Cloud Gaming Ios Lag

I have full root access, so installing VMWare Fusion was not a problem. I couldn’t install 64-bit Windows, but the 32-bit version went in just fine.

Xcloud Coming To Ios

The performance of this VM seems to be very good. It has no problem running a VM within a VM. My performance bottleneck is clearly the Internet connection speed to my own office.

Support

Xbox Cloud Gaming On Ios

Xcloud support were quite responsive, and provided useful and timely answers to all of my questions.

Budget conscious? Xcodeclub might work out for you. But if you want a real killer go with xcloud for a few dollars more. You wont be disappointed.