This weekend, developer Mattia La Spina launched the iGBA as one of the first retro game emulators legitimately available on the iOS App Store following Apple’s rule change regarding such emulators earlier this month. However, on Monday morning, iGBA was removed from the App Store following controversy over unauthorized reuse of source code from another emulator project. Shortly after iGBA launched, some people on social media started to notice that the project appeared to be based on code from GBA4iOS, a nearly decade-old emulator that developer Riley Testut and a partner developed as high school students (and distributed via a temporary security hole in the iOS App Store) . Testut took to social media Sunday morning to call iGBA a “knockoff” of GBA4iOS. “I didn’t give anyone permission to do this, and yet it is now at the top of the charts (despite being filled with ads and tracking),” he wrote.
GBA4iOS is an open source program released under the GNU GPLv2 license, with license terms that allow anyone to “use, modify, and distribute my original code for this project without fear of legal consequences.” But these expanded licensing terms only apply “unless you plan to submit your app to the Apple App Store, in which case written permission from me is explicitly required.”
Images from the original release, circa 2014, of GBA4iOS.
“To be clear, I’m not mad at the developer [of iGBA]”, Testut added on social networks. “I’m pissed that Apple took the time to change the App Store rules to allow emulators, then approved a knockoff of my own app.”
Hurry up and wait
MacRumors reports that Apple cited two sections of its App Store Guidelines to remove iGBA: one related to spam (Section 4.3) and one related to copyright (section 5.2). At present, it is a bit ambiguous whether copyright infringement refers to the copyright in the source code of the emulator itself or to the ability of the emulator to play easily to copyrighted games from Nintendo and others.
As we discussed earlier this month, the wording of Apple’s recent App Store Guidelines update makes it unclear whether developers can release general-purpose emulators with the ability to play ROMs for which they do not control the rights. Besides iGBA, a Commodore 64 emulator named Emu64 XL and built from the VICE open source project was recently launched on the iOS App Store.
Apple has not yet responded to a request for comment from Ars Technica. But Testut written early monday morning that “it’s to Apple’s credit, however, once they became aware of the problem, they took it seriously. So I really don’t believe it was malicious at all – just an unfortunate situation for everyone involved.” Testut added that iGBA creator, La Spina, “reached out to me via email to personally apologize for the mess. So, no hard feelings.”
But Testut had some hard feelings about Apple’s treatment of AltStore, an alternative marketplace for sideloading iOS apps that it is trying to launch under new European regulations. This would provide Testut with a legitimate means to distribute Deltaa “sequel” to GBA4iOS that emulates many classic Nintendo consoles on Apple devices.
“My frustration came entirely from the fact that we were ready to launch Delta since last month,” Tetstut wrote on social media. “This whole situation could have been avoided if Apple hadn’t delayed our approval after changing its rules to allow emulators.”