The Best Web-Based Games for iPhone

Forget downloading a game, just play right in the browser

The iPhone has served as a natural platform for games since the device was first released to the market. Having a little time-killer with you whenever you need it has a lot of appeal.

Although Apple's App Store features thousands of games you can download and run on your iPhone, in the early days of the iPhone, options were a bit more constrained. So some developers developed games that would run in a Safari window, sized to mimic the look-and-feel of a non web-based games before such games were widely available for download.

More than a decade after the iPhone's release, many of those Safari games still exist. They may appear a bit rudimentary, but most are free and—like their platform-app counterparts—addicting time sinks. And as an added bonus, the Safari-based games don't require a download, which is helpful if you're constantly battling a storage-full problem on your device.

Web-Based Games

Midsection Of Man Playing Games In Mobile Phone
Nopparat Jaikla / EyeEm / Getty Images

These games don’t need to be installed — just point the iPhone’s Safari web browser to these sites and you’ll be ready to play!

Installable Games

Some older games were intended for side-loading into a jailbroken iPhone, for example, iPhone Doom — a version of the popular FPS Doom for the iPhone.

Although installable games were popular in the early days of the iPhone, Apple's tightening security standards (making jailbreaking almost impossible with modern versions of iOS) and the proliferation of apps and games in the App Store make installable games a relic of the device's early years.

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