As @Bortels said upstream, there’s seems to be no reason why Apple wouldn’t approve a player app. There’s literally nothing that could be done with the player, that couldn’t already be done with Codea.
But it would certainly be a boost to anyone just wanting to say “hey, look at what I did in Codea.” It could easily make Codea very popular with the Ludum Dare crowd, as at the moment there is no good way to create an iOS app for competition.
It’s easy to do, I’ve been running a Codea Player clone to test out apps on my iphone. I run a codea project that syncs to dropbox and the ios App then syncs and shows the apps. Also lets me test forums code on my iPhone when I’m away from my iPad. I’d really like to see TLL release Codea Player 
Allow Codea Users to upload their projects and have Codea Play show a list of Projects that can be run.
@Briarfox - Interesting concept. I was assuming that they would be built in, but this would provide a large library of available projects to test.
If you do that, I would recommend having a section that features all the complete projects, such as BattleChips, and anybody else who would be willing to throw in their projects. I would for sure throw in a watered down version of StackIt.
@Zoyt It would be very useful definitely! Not so much for me as I don’t own an iPhone but it would be good to load useful apps on another persons iPad. @Briarfox it’s always a risk depending on how you do it I guess, if you make sure the app can only load code off of the internet without an integrated text loader (plists etc can be edited along with many other files on jail broken devices) then it is secure. Although jailbreak isn’t as valid as even I myself downloaded Codea (pirated :ar! ) for free but after a few days I had to give the team credit for the excellent work and forked over the £7 at the time. I always buy an app if I use it after testing it out, if I don’t I delete it, just my policy!
What about publishing Codea Community? That would allow users to run any program published on CC (probably in a special category) but it wouldnt allow running any lua code that isn’t published on CC which requires buying Codea. Throw in something telling you to buy Codea if you want to write your own code, and it’s a win-win
@JakAttak I hadn’t thought of that. @Mark Good point on Ludum Dare. I’ve always wanted to participate but the lack of an ability to share always has kept me out. A TLL supported Codea play would be a perfect fit. I bet it would really increase Codea’s use and exposure.
Here’s my very rough prototype, sorry for the horrible cuts but you get the idea. It also might be loud i’m in a mechine shop. Note The Code Play Icon is used as a placeholder.
@JakAttak - I thought about it, but CC is typically used for more experimental projects, not complete ones or whatever. You might try adding a tag that says “publish to Codea Play” or something.
@Briarfox - Very cool! I was thinking of using the native Cocoa UI, if I was to make a version. I do understand that that is (probably) in an area that you are not very familiar with.
@Zoyt, ya. I’m thinking it could be done like so:
1 - A Codea program dependency that allows you to upload projects with a few tags: Alpha, Beta, Release
2 - A Native iOS Application which simply includes a table view of projects with a switch between the three tags, a sync button to pull the latest projects, and an option to open the AppStore to Codea.
As far as i’m concerned, that’s all you really need.
@JakAttak - It’s gotta be stylish. B-)
I was thinking more of a UI similar to the original Codea Play with a + button to import from CC. It’d also check for updates to projects.
I also had a concept for something similar to AirCode, but built into Codea. It’d by having your iPad as a host, then connecting multiple Codea Plays up to it. When you’re ready, you push a button and it’s pushed out. However, that’d take a lot more work on TLL’s end.
Codea Play was promising. From what I can tell/remember it was shut down because the apps didn’t run on iPhone well. Probably because none of them scaled via WIDTH and HEIGHT. Many people have release iPhone apps with Codea, so obviously its possible. Perhaps just resurrecting the old Codea Play (with iOS 7 update of course) would do it.
@JakAttak - I believe it was shut down due to TLL seeing Codea as a more important product. While the benefits of Codea Play would be great, we were requesting more features for Codea itself, but I’m not Simeon, so I can’t say.
However, the runtime is super flexible, so there is absolutely not need for TLL to make it themselves.
I was planning on making one once the school year is over (very soon), but I had no idea that @Briarfox was making one already, so we are considering working together on it, possibly with the support of Simeon.
Thanks!
@Briarfox @JakAttak @Zoyt - I like the idea CodeaPlay + CC. Another ‘publishing’ approach could be to have a special CC user named ie: ‘codeaplay’, when you want to publish for CodePlay app, you selective ‘share’ with this one. Like that, projects tags can be used as usual. In the CodeaPlay app you can grab the list of projects only shared with the right user ‘codeaplay’. I should take time work on what I left on CC, allow images upload for project. Also a custom url scheme could be great to open the app from a web link.
@toffer, yes that sounds very nice, inline with what I was thinking.
It would be nice to use same tool for Beta Testing and Release.