Introduction

DoesItARM answers one question, authoritatively and currently: does this Mac app or game run on Apple Silicon — and how? Not a vague “it should work,” but a specific verdict — runs natively, runs through Rosetta 2, runs through a translation layer (Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit or CrossOver), or doesn’t run — with the macOS version, the chip, the date, and the evidence behind it.

The problem

The Mac is in the middle of a forced architecture transition, and the ground keeps moving:

• Apple is removing Rosetta 2 in macOS 28 (fall 2027), which breaks 18,800+ Intel-only apps. macOS 27 (fall 2026) is already Apple-Silicon-only. Every Mac user, gamer, and IT team needs to know what survives.
• A compatibility answer decays: an app ships a native build, a game updates its anti-cheat, a new macOS or Game Porting Toolkit release changes what runs. A blog post from last year is often wrong now.
• AI assistants increasingly answer “can I run X on my M-series Mac?” — and they need fresh ground truth. Today they fetch DoesItARM’s pages thousands of times a day on users’ behalf, because their training data goes stale.

Existing answers are scattered (forum threads, year-old reviews), free-but-static (community wikis), or locked to one surface (a website a human has to read). None is a current, queryable, multi-surface source of truth.

What DoesItARM is

A single fresh dataset of Apple Silicon compatibility verdicts, surfaced three ways:

1. A free public website (doesitarm.com, live today) — humans and AI crawlers read it.
2. An agent API / MCP server (planned) — AI assistants and developer tools query it directly for a current verdict, instead of scraping a page.
3. An enterprise readiness product (planned) — IT teams scan their software estate against the Rosetta 2 deadline and get a remediation plan.

The data is produced by a hybrid engine: crowdsourced reports plus an automated test harness that runs real titles on a cloud Apple Silicon fleet. Freshness is the point — and the moat.

What it is not

DoesItARM does not host, sell, stream, or redistribute games or apps. It publishes facts about them — compatibility verdicts — which is a different (and far more tractable) business than licensing software. See Motivation for why that distinction is the whole strategy.