The Game Boy emulator iGBA is said to have been kicked out of the App Store only because it was an illegal copy of the GBA4iOS open source project. In a statement to the news site MacRumors, Apple indicated that fundamental concerns about using downloaded ROMs did not play a role.
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This would be good news for fans of emulators. At the weekend, GBA4iOS briefly appeared in the App Store after a relaxation of Apple’s rules that came into force at the beginning of April, only to be immediately removed again by Apple. All that was known to date was that iGBA was kicked out for spam and copyright infringement. This fueled concerns that Apple generally allows emulators, but is taking a very close look at emulators out of fear of piracy to ensure that they cannot load arbitrary ROMs.
ROMs supposedly not a problem
GBA4iOS developer Riley Testut, its open source project was copied by iGBA and provided with advertising, had its own plans to bring its emulator to the iPhone via the official channels before iGBA appeared in the App Store. He could now take this up again. So far, GBA4iOS can be downloaded from Github and installed directly on an iPhone using Apple’s Xcode programming environment. However, this route may have been too tedious for users who are not very experienced in programming.
Apple told MacRumors that it simply removed iGBA from the App Store after it was revealed that it was a copycat app that copied another developer’s work and passed it off as its own. The iPhone manufacturer also confirmed that emulators in the App Store are allowed to load ROMs from the web as long as the app only emulates retro console games. That’s probably why iGBA was initially waved through by the app review, says the report.
Some questions remain unanswered
However, questions still remain unanswered, such as where exactly Apple draws the line with retro games and whether the rights owners of games that are posted online will still intervene. Nintendo, for example, says very clearly that game files called ROMs are pirated copies. Uploading and downloading such pirated copies of Nintendo games is illegal.
(mki)