Update: Apple confirmed to Macrumors that the iGBA emulator was removed from the App Store because it was a rip-off of GBA4iOS and it violated Apple"s rules regarding spam (section 4.3) and intellectual property (section 5.2).
Update: The iGBA Game Boy emulator app has been removed from the App Store as spotted by Parker Ortolani. The reason for its removal is unclear at the moment.
Following Apple"s relaxation in its App Store policy to allow the publishing of retro game emulators in its marketplace, iGBA, a free Game Boy emulator, becomes the first emulator to be available for iPhone and iPad on the App Store.
Apple has been pretty restrictive and never allowed emulators to be published on its App Store, till this recent change in its App Store policies. Things have changed now, and the Game Boy emulator iGBA is already available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad.
One of the coolest things about the iGBA Game Boy emulator is that you can download game ROMs from the web (from any source you like), load them in the emulator, and play. This is pretty crucial because, although Apple allowed the publishing of game emulators on the App Store, it never agreed to allow ROMs to be downloaded from outside and used in emulators.
The developer of the iGBA Game Boy emulator is surely taking fair advantage of this rule change and allowing users to download game ROMs and enjoy them. Notably, iGBA is based on the open-source project GBA4iOS but is filled with embedded ads.
iGBA does its job well by emulating Game Boy games. You can download a Game Boy Advance or Game Boy Color ROM from any source you like, then load it in iGBA to play it. It is a fully-featured emulator with features such as save states, virtual controller customization, haptic settings, and AirPlay external display projection.
This is a nice surprise because there was ambiguity on whether emulators would be allowed to offer a file picker option or not. And because of a lack of clarity, popular emulator PPSSPP"s creator, Henrik Rydgård, has been holding back the debut of the emulator on the App Store for later this year.
Now that the iGBA emulator, which offers the option to load and play downloaded ROMs, is officially available on the App Store, we may see the PPSSPP emulator arrive soon too on the marketplace. You can download the iGBA emulator from the App Store by visiting this link.