I don’t neccesarily think they would be forced to release it through the developer.apple site, but they would need some way of addressing the NDA license issue. It’s a bit weird Apple hasn’t made some kind of API that can validate iOS licensees in situations like these so third parties like Epic can push out these new features without breaking the NDA between Apple and the developer.
Seeing how Metal is only an A7 (and logically upwards) feature, do we know how a deployed Metal supported program binary on the App store will behave if installed on a normal OpenGL only device like the A6 devices? Will it refuse to run, fall back to OpenGL or how will this process be handled?