Driven by the European Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple has decided to authorize emulators on the App Store after 16 years of resistance. Delta, the first of them, has chosen the App Store in all countries in the world… except the 27 in the European Union. With us, you have to subscribe to an alternative paid store to download it.
The signal sent by Delta is not good. Known to hackers for several years (it was previously called GBA4iOS), Delta is software capable of emulating Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS games on iPhone. On the App Store, its marketing was prohibited for a long time, since emulation was not permitted by Apple.
At the beginning of April, Apple revised its policy and now allows emulation. The Digital Markets Act, the European digital regulation, probably motivated this decision. The brand’s desire is not to let alternative stores overshadow its App Store, particularly with emulators which risk attracting people.
On April 17, Delta made its grand appearance on the App Store… with 27 exceptions. European Union countries do not have access to the application in the Apple store, since they must go through the AltStore, an alternative store created by the developer of Delta. Worse, Europeans have to pay, while App Store users have access to Delta for free.
Will the European App Store lose applications?
The unavailability of Delta on the European App Store does not bode well.
To make its own paid store (1.80 euros per year) more competitive, developer Riley Testut decided to make Delta an AltStore exclusive. Its objective is to encourage as many Europeans as possible to install its service, while hoping that they will use the AltStore to download other applications. As it stands, Delta’s presence on the French App Store would have made its AltStore quite dispensable.
With the DMA, the European Union wants to offer Europeans choice. One of the objectives of the regulation is to end the “monopoly” of the App Store, by allowing developers and users to access other sources to install applications.
Here the DMA has the opposite effect. It does not create more choice, but more complexity. The European Union, without which Delta could not exist in the App Store, is the only private territory of Delta in the App Store. The decision of Riley Testut, who is nevertheless a fervent defender of open source, opens the door to a very fragmented European applications market. Could a giant like Meta, which knows its applications are dispensable in Europe, take the risk of removing Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp from the App Store, in favor of its own store? The possibility exists.
Another unfortunate fact: the DMA and alternative stores only concern the iPhone, while the App Store is open to all Apple devices. Only the App Store version of Delta works on iPad, Mac and Vision Pro, the AltStore version is exclusive to the iPhone… The European version of the application is even inferior.
Unwittingly, Delta is playing into the hands of Apple, which is certainly delighted to see the DMA having the first negative effects for Europeans. The brand’s goal is to turn its users against regulators, in the hope that they will side with it. Delta is the first example of a list that could quickly grow.
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