If you're a veteran gamer, you should have an impression of a range of gaming handhelds, including GBA and PS.
As long as you mention the familiar terms of little bee, Contra and Pokemon, memories will gradually come back.
With the entry of the smartphone era, many handheld simulator apps have also begun to take root on major platforms.
But for Apple users, it has always been a luxury to want to play emulators on the iPhone due to the restrictions of the App Store policy.
The good news is that some time ago Apple quietly revised the rules of the App Store to ease this restriction.
Image source: IT House
With the lifting of the relevant policies, an emulator app called iGBA has suddenly been released on the App Store.
It is understood that iGBA is a handheld emulator that supports running GameBoy series games.
In terms of user experience, iGBA is not much different from other emulators, requiring users to pull up ROM files from device files in order to run the game.
At the same time, iGBA also comes with features such as instant save, game acceleration, and vibration feedback, which are all standard features of the emulate software.
Since iGBA was the first retro emulator to hit the App Store, it quickly topped the App Store charts a few hours after its release, causing a lot of attention.
As a result, when more players heard about it, they found that the app had been removed from the App Store.
According to Apple's response, the app violated the store's copyright and spam rules.
In a follow-up explanation, Apple further elaborated on the reasons for removing the app.
To put it simply, iGBA is a plagiarized version of another open-source project, GBA4iOS, and adds additional advertising content to it for profit.
Subsequently, Testut, the original author of GBA4iOS, also confirmed this on social platforms, saying that he had not authorized anyone.
At present, iGBA can no longer be queried in the App Store through search, and users who have downloaded and installed it can still use it normally.
Image source: github
It is worth mentioning that Apple also gave an in-depth interpretation of the project on retro game emulators in the App Store in response to this incident.
Apple said that with the revision of the App Store rules, retro game emulator apps have been allowed to be listed normally.
iGBA, for example, was approved by Apple before it became aware of the plagiarism, which seems to imply that the GameBoy family of emulators could be released on the App Store.
At the same time, emulator apps available on the App Store can load ROM game files downloaded from the Internet, but the app itself cannot provide a link to the file.
图片来源：macrumors
If nothing else, more developers may join the crowd and launch more game emulator apps in the future.
In terms of game copyright, there are also some issues that may lead to disputes.
According to the customer support documentation on Nintendo's website, it is illegal to upload and download game ROM files from third parties.
At the same time, Nintendo will reserve the right to hold accountable for these actions.
图片来源:Nintendo
It will be interesting to see if this potential issue will have an impact when more emulators are added to the App Store in the future.
What do you think about this? Feel free to leave a message in the comment area and discuss with you.
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