Almost a week after the release of emulators in Apple’s App Store, the first Game Boy emulator for iPhone, iGBA, was released, but Apple removed it a few hours later. It can no longer be found in the App Store, as a check by Golem.de has shown. Macrumors reports that Apple has announced that the emulator app has been removed from the App Store.
According to Apple, the app violates App Store guidelines on spam and copyright. Apple has not yet provided any further information about this; Macrumors has asked the company about this but has not yet received a response. It is therefore unclear whether Apple itself took action and removed iGBA from the App Store after the approval was given or whether the company took action in response to an objection from the Game Boy manufacturer Nintendo.
The emulator app iGBA is said to be an unauthorized copy of the open source emulator GBA4iOS, which comes from Riley Testut and has been distributed outside the App Store for a long time. After Apple released iGBA on the App Store, the app soon hit the App Store charts. There was criticism on social networks that this was plagiarism overlaid with a lot of advertising.
The developer of GBA4iOS comments
“Apparently Apple has approved a copy of GBA4iOS for the App Store”Testut explained in one Posting on threads. “I didn’t give anyone permission to do this, and yet it’s now at the top of the charts (even though it’s filled with advertising and tracking)”continued Testut.
Full of irony, he ends his contribution with the words: “I’m so glad App Review exists to protect consumers from scams and rip-offs like this.” Especially in connection with the debate about the release of alternative app stores for iOS, it repeatedly played a crucial role that Apple emphasized that the App Store protects customers from fraud and harmful apps.
Anyone who has already installed iGBA can continue to use the app. Using iGBA, Game Boy titles can be played by installing appropriate ROM files on the iPhone. Nintendo owns the copyright to such ROM files and considers it illegal if they are used. It would be conceivable that Nintendo complained to Apple and demanded that iGBA be removed.