The US-based multinational technology company Apple removed the iGBA Game Boy emulator app for iPhone less than a day after it cleared the app's launch on the weekend. This particular app is among the first to take advantage of the new policy changes Apple recently introduced to its retro game emulators, an effort by the technology company seeking to open up to competitors in the App Store, including AltStore, which aims to make available for iPhone users game emulators and other Patreon-backed apps.

Released as a free version last Sunday, iGBA is an advertisement-sustained imitation of the open source project GBA4iOS, which provided an emulator for playing Game Boy games on your iOS device. It says in its description it works: it can download both Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance ROMs over the web and then launch them within the app to play.

Although the app was submitted to the App Store without permission from GBA4iOS developer Riley Testut, who also developed the AltStore and Delta, a Nintendo emulator, a popular successor to GBA4iOS.

Testut said in a post on Threads on Sunday that he was angrier at Apple for approving iGBA while his own app Delta, already in Apple's TestFlight, had been ready since March 5. He also wasn't too pleased at his work being knocked off and monetized this way.

"I didn't authorize anyone to do this, but now it sits at the top of the charts (even though it is full of ads + tracking)," said Testut in his message on Threads. "I have probably bitten my tongue a lot in the last month…but this really gets my goat. Great that App Review exists to defend consumers from scams and rip-offs like this," he added sarcastically.

But, several noted that the knock-off version used the same code as GBA4iOS. Now, others noted that the GBA4iOS emulator was distributed under a GNU GPL v2 license, which should have otherwise permitted copies - except for the fact that Testut added a custom restriction to it which prohibited App Store distribution for any work containing the code. They argued such a restriction wasn't technically allowed under GPL v2.

But Apple then had a change of heart and pulled the knock-off app on grounds of spam, and copyright infringement rules 4.3 and 5.2 respectively hence effectively supporting Testut's case after initially doing wrong.

The functionality in the app was approved, Apple said to TechCrunch. However, when the company discovered that the app was in fact a copy of another developer's submission and passing it off as its own, it took action within those guidelines.
The Cupertino-based tech giant has been pushed to make the App Store more open thanks to the EU's Digital Markets Act. It has previously announced that it will also permit streaming game stores across the world after an update to its App Store guidelines in accordance with the new regulation. However, the extra support for retro game emulators was added only this month with a caveat that the games must use in-app purchases if they offer downloads of digital items. Although that might have potentially opened another stream of revenue for Apple, the iGBA app was free and ad-supported so this wasn't a loss on Apple's bottom line to get rid of it.