The thing about emulators on iOS is starting to sound like a bad joke. We recently talked about the iGBA soap opera, the first free emulator for iOS. An app that was approved by the App Store, but was removed from the Apple Store hours later for violating the terms of the App Review Guidelines. At least I’m curious.

Last night we received news of a new emulator: Bimmy. This was the first NES emulator for the iPhone and apparently did not contain adware or apps that violated Apple’s regulations. The developer “out of fear” decided to remove it from the Google app store.

The soap opera continues: Bimmy is the first NES emulator to come to the App Store. It wasn’t much more than that: an app that let you run any kind of NES ROM. It was a very promising app, containing no advertising or data collection.

Even though everything looks perfect in the emulator, not even 24 hours have passed: If we try to search in the App Store, we can’t find anything. The developer removed it.

Why is Bimmy disappearing?. Unlike IGBA, Bimmy did not disappear due to Apple policies. It was the developer himself who decided to eliminate it out of fear.

“Nobody pressured me to do this, but I got more and more nervous as the day went by.”

This app is no longer available on the Apple App Store and there doesn’t seem to be anything to indicate it will return. Its developer assures that the reason for the decision was nerves.

A fear that has a basis. Launching an emulator is a bold idea because the most popular ones are under Nintendo’s supervision: NES, GameBoy, GameCube, N64, etc. The Japanese giant managed to shut down Yuzu and Citra, the most well-known emulators of Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS.

Nintendo has been at war against emulators for a while now, a rather complex battle since emulators themselves are not illegal: What is illegal are downloading of non-copyrighted files and unauthorized copies.

The best is yet to come. As we mentioned when talking about iGBA, the battle to release the best free emulators is already starting. We will almost certainly see how the App Store becomes flooded with such applications in the next few days.

What will matter will be what each emulator’s intentions are, whether the reviews are done a little more carefully than the iGBA, and how Nintendo will deal with a flood of developers taking advantage of the fact that it’s already allowed to release emulators on the market. App store.

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