It’s been an interesting couple of weeks since Apple updated its guidelines to explicitly allow emulator apps into the App Store. After spending enormous energy to chase such things away every chance they got over the past decade and a half, this announcement was like a nonchalant “nah it’s fine now” and I don’t think anybody really knew what would come next. Emulators are allowed now? Like, any emulator? It just seemed so weird after so many years of developers needing to sneak hidden emulators into apps or jump through all sorts of other crazy hoops to circumvent the App Store to get them on iOS devices. Who was going to cast the first stone and test how serious Apple was going to be with allowing emulators on the App Store.
Well, the first couple that have popped up haven’t gone so well. Over the weekend iGBA was released in the App Store, but it turns out it was just a fork of Riley Testut’s GBA4iOS, which longtime readers of TouchArcade should be very familiar with. It was filled with ads and tracking, and was removed by Apple after spending a couple of days at the top of the charts. Then Bimmy, an NES emulator, was released earlier this week, but was taken down shortly after by the developer himself due to feeling uneasy about the whole situation.
So it seemed that Apple was quite serious about allowing emulators in the App Store now, and all that was left was to wait for an actual quality one by a seasoned developer. Which brings us to today. The aforementioned Riley Testut has now released Delta, the successor emulator to his previous GBA4iOS, into the App Store. Like GBA4iOS, Delta emulates Game Boy Advance, Game Boy, and Game Boy Color, and also emulates NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, and Nintendo DS. It has the benefit of more than a decade of work behind it, so the whole experience is extremely polished. Our sister site Macrumors has a great overview video of the Delta emulator on iPhones.
It was definitely kind of jarring to go digging up old stories about GBA4iOS and realize that it was an entire decade ago that Riley Testut was pushing the boundaries of what we thought was possible with emulating classic systems on iOS devices. And that was while still a senior in high school, no less. So today’s official launch of Delta complete with Apple’s blessing is really a milestone I never thought I’d see. I’m not sure if they had a pizza party or not, though. I’m not sure if Delta is available for everybody globally or not, but I will note that anyone in the EU will need to download it through the new AltStore which also launched today, as opposed to through the actual App Store. By whatever means, do grab Delta while you can as it’s an excellent emulator in every regard and, well, you never really know when Apple might change its mind about all this, so get while the getting’s good.
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