App Store: iGBA immediately removed by Apple, but emulators are allowed

iGBAL’Game Boy Advance emulator launched in the last few hours on the App Store, it has already been removed by Applebut the move seems to have nothing to do with the regularity or otherwise of emulators in general, which seem to be allowed in the digital store anyway.

A few hours after the launch of iGBA on iOS, which was sensational, considering the strangeness of seeing a GBA emulator regularly included in the App StoreApple quickly took action by removing the software in question, but the issue continues to be unclear.

Apparently, in fact, the removal does not derive from an intrinsic irregularity of the emulator as such, but rather from the fact that the software appears to be essentially a copy of a previously published emulator, which we had already pointed out and which was actually strange.

In fact, iGBA appears to be an ad-supported copy of the open source project GBA4iOSsold within the store evidently without the consent of the author of the original, who had in fact expressed his disappointment about X.

A tangled story

Riley Testut, who also developed the AltStore and Delta emulators, had noted that he had not received any requests to publish iGBA, and that he was not even aware of the project based on his software open source.

What had particularly angered the developer was the fact that his Delta application, on the contrary, was still stuck in the certification process, which demonstrated some incorrectness in the launch of iGBA.

To tell the truth, the matter is even more complicated, because GBA4iOS is distributed through the GNU GPL v2 license, which technically should allow the distribution of modified copies of the same software and that the restriction requested by Testut it would not be in line with the regulation of the membership distribution.

In any case, Apple has decided to remove iGBA, but specifying, as reported to TechCrunch, that this resulted from the dispute with the author of the original software and not from the fact that it is an emulator. The Emulators continue to be considered permitted on the App Store, apparently.