My favorite mobile game has been busted on iPad for months

Riot’s rival to Hearthstone made a splashy debut back in 2020 but if you prefer to play the card game on Apple’s smallest iPad you’re currently out of luck.

Legends of Runeterra has been broken on the iPad Mini 6 since late February 2024. 

When you boot up the game on the second-most recent version of Apple’s tiny tablet, the user interface fails to load. For reference, this is what you see instead:

The main reason I know about this is because that is the platform that I typically play Riot’s card battler on. 

Although I haven’t picked the game up in a year or so, I’ve sunk a lot of time into Legends of Runeterra over the years. Even as a veteran though, I have to admit I was a little surprised to encounter the issue earlier this week. 

Initially, I assumed that the bug might have been caused by my device being a few iPadOS updates behind the curve. When an operating system upgrade (or two) didn’t solve my problems I went to Reddit and was pretty disappointed to find that not only has this issue been unresolved for six months but that it’s something that those on the development team for the game are well aware of.

Based on comments posted by Legends of Runeterra’s executive producer Eric Shen, the issue has been known to the team for a while but doesn’t have an obvious or easy fix. 

That was back in July 2024. It’s been almost six months since then and almost nine since the issue was first reportedly introduced by Patch 5.2. So far as I can tell there’s been no public statement or movement in resolving the issue since then. 

Although it’s hardly unheard of for an older game to have issues running on tablets (and even if it is far from Riot’s most popular or lucrative title), Legends of Runeterra is hardly abandon-ware. Apple named the digital card game as the best thing you could play on an iPad back in 2020 and it’s gone on to have a pretty solid run in the years since. 

Riot has pivoted direction more than once but Legends of Runeterra is still very much alive. It doesn’t have a ranked queue for standard anymore but there’s still a decent number of people playing and regular content updates. As recently as  a few weeks ago, Riot added Ambessa to the game as a tie-in for the second season of Arcane and – this next part should almost go without saying but – obviously you can still spend on the game via microtransactions like cosmetics.

It’s true that those affected by this issue can always boot the game up on another platform but at the same time it’s incredibly bad form for Riot to leave this bug unaddressed for this long. It’s fair to say that the Legends of Runeterra development team has shrunk in size since the game launched, but we are still talking about one of the biggest game developers on the planet.  

If Riot is going to keep letting people like me install Legends of Runeterra on my iPad then that version of the game should work. If the company can’t meet that low bar and this problem isn’t one that can be fixed then the company should take that version of the card game offline. At the very least, it could offer up a more public explanation. 

In a world where Riot came out and announced a formal end to support for Legends of Runeterra on the iPad Mini, I’d still be disappointed but I wouldn’t be nearly so frustrated. Do better.