The weekend’s soap opera featured iGBA. The first GameBoy emulator to be released on the App Store. As we saw last night, it became the third most downloaded free app in the Apple app store and disappeared completely a few hours later.

And there is no. This isn’t just because it’s an emulator. What might have happened is still being debated, and although two main scenarios have been considered, neither of them offers a definitive explanation for what happened to the iGBA.

What was iGBA?. iGBA left its mark on iOS before and after during the hours it was active on the App Store. After Apple was forced to accept emulators in the App Store, the first GameBoy Color and GameBoy Advance emulator, iGBA, was released last Sunday.

On the one hand, the emulator allowed something unusual: running any .gbc or .gba ROM from Files. You just had to download any game from our browser, open it from downloads and automatically open the application. iOS recognizing ROM files is something that has never been seen before.

On the other hand, it integrated the search into the application to make it easier for the users. This part was a bit complicated: The game didn’t have a ROM repository, but it did let you search for ROMs via Google. Technically, this technique is not illegal: We were searching through Safari, not the emulator.

iGBA interface.

How did iGBA work?. iGBA’s interface and usability were outstanding and simple. An emulator that saves in its list the ROMs we have installed, offers the possibility of installing cheat codes, and a fast speed mode for classics, where this faster execution is appreciated in some classics.

Actually, I’m not hiding, just yesterday I was playing Pokémon Radical Red, a PokéCommunity Fangame that I’ve been following for a long time, with this emulator.

Nobody knows why you disappeared. This morning we woke up to the news: iGBA has disappeared from the App Store. Although there are various theories on the table, none of them offer clear answers. Riley Testut, developer of the open source GBA4iOS project, complained on Threads that Apple allowed a developer to publish a “knock-off” copy of its emulator and flood it with ads.

This is a sensitive issue. In fact, iGBA was nothing more than an adaptation of GBA4iOS. But exactly GBA4iOS is an open source projectSo it was only a matter of time before someone relied on him for their own projects.

“To be clear, I’m not mad at the developer.
What pissed me off was that Apple went to the trouble of changing the App Store rules to allow emulators and then approved an emulated version of my own app even though I was ready to launch Altstoreio with Delta. “Since March 5”.

In fact, the developer states that it will be released on March 5 with the App Store’s GBA4iOS-based emulator Delta. This will be a store with paid applications and no advertising model.

There will be more emulators. iGBA is the first emulator released on the App Store, but there are more to come. Emulators are no longer banned on the Apple App Store, so there is an open path for a race where many developers will fight to offer the best free emulator.

Amid Android’s debacle with emulators due to Nintendo’s demands, finding a completely legal alternative is no easy matter. Emulators are not illegal: downloading copyrighted content and running it without paying, yes.

Image | iGBA

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