It’s been a wild few months for the developers behind Delta, a retro game emulator app. Their latest hiccup came when Adobe accused the app of copying its logo, which is literally just a stylized version of the Greek letter delta. But for this indie app with a team of two, getting legal threats from Adobe isn’t even close to the most interesting thing about it.
Up until this spring, emulators were not allowed in Apple’s App Store. It’s such a long-standing gripe that when Delta creator Riley Testut was in high school, he built GBA4iOS, an iOS emulator that could be sideloaded via an exploit, with no jailbreaking required. That was 10 years ago. Of course, Apple caught on to the existence of the exploit and patched it, and that was the end of our ability to play Pokémon Yellow on our phones. So, why is Delta — the successor to GBA4iOS — suddenly relevant again?
Recently, Apple changed its policy to allow retro game emulators. To say this was a shock was an understatement. Even though he was caught off guard, Testut was ready, since he had still been building Delta for AltStore, an independent App Store he’s building … but first, another developer ripped a copy of GBA4iOS, added ads to it, and uploaded it to the App Store as iGBA. The app was quickly removed, since Testut obviously didn’t give the developer permission to steal his work.
But then, finally, Delta was allowed to shine: The retro game emulator climbed to No. 1 in the App Store, and as Testut dreamed back in high school, it’s now easier than ever to play Pokémon (and other games) on your phone.
You might still be wondering why Apple even made these changes in policy to begin with, and how Apple’s international regulatory pressure figures into all of this. Well, good thing we’ve made you a whole video to catch you up to speed.
