If you are an iOS user, this news might surprise you. Recently, Apple has removed the Game Boy emulator iGBA from the App Store for violating the spam (section 4.3) and copyright (section 5.2) provisions of the company's App Review Guidelines. However, officials did not provide specific details.
For your information, iGBA was accused of plagiarizing developer Riley Testut's open-source work GBA4iOS, which has been only available outside the Apple App Store. iGBA quickly rose to the top of the App Store rankings after its release last weekend. However, social media is full of negative comments from users about the app. Users generally believe that iGBA is a poor copycat product full of advertisements.
“It seems that Apple actually approved a clone of GBA4iOS,” Testut posted on the Threads platform. “I never authorized anyone to do this, but it is now occupying the top spot on the charts (and it is also filled with ads. and trackers),” he quipped, “Thank you so much for the existence of App Store review, which protects users from such scams and knockoffs.”
In addition, it's unclear whether Apple removed iGBA because it believed the app copied GBA4iOS. iGBA allows iPhone users to play Game Boy games by loading free ROMs downloaded from the Internet. ROMs for various games can be found online, and users who have installed iGBA before it was removed from the shelves can still use the application.
Nintendo said on its US customer support website that downloading pirated copies of its games is illegal. It's unclear whether Nintendo submitted a complaint to Apple about iGBA and whether this was one of the factors that led to its removal.
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