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It’s a surprise that Apple’s first emulator, iGBA, has been taken down from the App Store for violating copyright.
This is the iGBA emulator
The first emulator to hit the App Store after Apple loosened its rules was iGBA, which was a copy of GBA4iOS, an open-source Game Boy Advance emulator for iOS. But Apple stopped it just a few days after it came out.
2: The Dispute
As soon as people heard that emulators were back, the iGBA emulator shot to the top of the App Store charts. It was quickly found out, though, that the emulator was a fake. The code was almost the same as GBA4iOS, but the licenses were taken out and ads were added, which is against the GNU General Public License⁹.
The Answer from Apple
Apple stated that it took iGBA off the App Store because it broke two rules about spam (section 4.3) and intellectual property (section 5.2).⁴. The company said the app was banned because it was a copy, and the original app’s developer was more angry with the company than the copycat creator‹.
What It Means for the Developer
The author of GBA4iOS, Riley Testut, saw the copy and wrote on Threads about what happened. Not the creator, but Apple, he was mad at for letting a clear copy out when his own Delta emulator, which was the replacement for GBA4iOS, had been in TestFlight, Apple’s beta testing tool for iOS apps, for more than a year⁴.
Bottom Line
The debate over iGBA, Apple’s first emulator, shows how hard it is to avoid copying other people’s work in the tech business. As things develop, it will be interesting to see how Apple and other tech companies deal with these problems in the future.
