Video game emulator Delta’s decade-long struggle against the iOS app store began with a school-issued TI-84 calculator.
When Riley Testut was a sophomore in high school, he showed his friends how to load illicit software onto their bulky graphing calculators. Such behavior was generally discouraged at school, but he wasn’t plotting to cheat on a test. He was simply traversing the Viridian Forest, surfing across the Kanto seas, and collecting gym badges.
By 2014, when Testut was a high school senior, the only way to install a retro video game emulator on an iOS device was to jailbreak it. But Testut didn’t want to damage his then-state-of-the-art iPhone 4. So, he spent months building an app that would let him play GBA games on his phone without voiding its warranty. That app became GBA4iOS.
Millions of people swarmed to GBA4iOS, reveling in the glorious experience of playing Game Boy titles on a palm-sized phone. Even Time Magazine wrote about it. But GBA4iOS was too successful for its own good and, soon, Testut had to face an adversary more formidable than Team Rocket: Eight months after the app’s release, Apple patched the loophole, quashing his app in the process.
‘The Pokémon broke free!’
Video game emulation is complex to pull off, but it’s simple for the users. You download an emulator – usually open source, like epsxe for PlayStation titles, or OpenEmu, which can emulate a bunch of consoles – and then get games to play on it.
But that’s where the issue lies: Finding a software copy of games, usually housed in a .ROM file, to use with these emulators is not as easy as buying games on the Nintendo eShop. You can buy hardware to legally extract the game file from old video game cartridges or discs that you own, but an easier way to play really old games is to just download their .ROM files for free from the internet — that’s basically piracy.
Downloading an app like Delta has never been illegal, but downloading the game files you need to play can be.
Given his prior experience, Testut was shocked when Apple changed its rules around emulators a few weeks ago. He uploaded Delta, a more refined version of GBA4iOS, and suddenly, he became the developer behind the No. 1 app on the App Store. Two weeks after release, Delta is still topping the charts of entertainment apps, and holds the second spot on the free apps charts. According to app intelligence company Appfigures, Delta has been downloaded about 3.8 million times in two weeks.
“It’s surreal how good the reception has been, and how many people are playing it,” he said. “This is the app I’ve been working on for 10 years.”
Running an app business without a middleman
When Gill joined Testut to work on AltStore, he encouraged Testut to set up a Patreon so he could stop taking odd jobs to pay the bills. Now, AltStore’s Patreon earns over $13,000 per month (up from about $10,000 at the beginning of April). In exchange for their monthly contributions, AltStore’s patrons get access to early app betas, like Delta’s test of iPad, SEGA Genesis support, as well as access to a community Discord.
Delta is a free app, so these millions of app downloads aren’t lining the devs’ pockets. Still, Testut and Gill don’t plan to change their monetization model.
“This was way bigger than we could have ever hoped for, honestly,” said Testut. “Being able to put Delta in the App Store has just made our message so obvious. We’re saying, ‘Hey, we’re trying to make apps that haven’t been able to exist before,’ and then the second Apple allows it, we’re in the App Store and we’re the number one app.”
