First Emulator App on Apple App Store Taken Down Within a Day

This month, Apple updated its guidelines once again to allow game emulators in the App Store to offer downloadable games. Following a week of this news, the Game Boy emulator iGBA was one of the first Apple-approved emulators for iPhone on the App Store. However, the emulator’s existence was short-lived. Apple removed the emulator iGBA from the App Store on the grounds of violating the company’s App Review Guidelines related to copyright and spam.

Talking about this first Game Boy Advance Emulator on the App Store, iGBA looked like a copycat version of developer Riley Testut’s open-source work GBA4iOS, which has been long distributed outside the App Store. Released this weekend, iGBA instantly grabbed a lot of attention and went to the top of the App Store charts. However, it got a backlash on social media. Many users criticized iGBA for being a poor duplication overlaid with ads.

In a thread post, Testut said “So apparently Apple approved a knock-off of GBA4iOS”. He further added, “I did not give anyone permission to do this, yet it’s now sitting at the top of the charts (despite being filled with ads + tracking).” He quipped that he was “so glad App Review exists to protect consumers from scams and rip-offs like this.”

Testut also created another Nintendo game emulator called Delta, which is distributed outside of the App Store and via the third-party marketplace AltStore in the EU. We have no idea if Testut has plans to bring Delta to the App Store following the rule change.

iGBA emulator lets iPhone users play Game Boy games by loading free ROMs downloaded from the internet. ROMs can be found on the web for various games, the most popular ones being Pokémon and The Legend of Zelda franchises.

Nintendo, on its customer support website in the United States, clearly mentions that it’s illegal to download pirated copies of its games.

Earlier we had no clarity why Apple removed iGBA. The giant has now clearly opened up about the decision. Apple told 9to5Mac that iGBA’s functionality was approved in compliance with the App Store guidelines. However, when Apple came to know that iGBA was an unauthorized clone of GBA4iOS, they immediately removed the emulator as it was violating spam and copyright App Store guidelines. Users who have already installed the iGBA emulator on their iPhones from the App Store can still use it.

Now, this clearly means iGBA wasn’t removed because it allowed importing ROMs downloaded from the internet. The decision was purely due to being a rip-off of GBA4iOS. This is great news for other game-emulating apps for iPhone and iPad. Apple is willing to allow game emulators of all kinds, provided they abide by all mandatory laws.