Unless you’ve been living underneath a rock recently, you’ll know all about emulators arriving on the iPhone. Heck, it’s all we talked about for a while, following the news as they dropped onto the App Store, writing guides, and testing out each one to see how faithfully they recreated our favourite consoles.
The best of the bunch was, and still is, Delta, and we were very honoured to be joined by the emulator’s creator as well as the founder of Alt Store Riley Testut on the Retrospect Podcast. We sat down and spoke about Riley’s early work creating GBA4iOS at school, how Delta came to be, going back and forth with Apple to get his emulator on the App Store, and the shock of Adobe sending him an email about the Delta logo.
The following article is made from carefully selected sections from the transcript of our interview with Riley Testut. As always, you can watch the full interview on YouTube or head Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your Podcasts to listen back.
So, without further ado, take it away, Riley!
Table of Contents
Getting To Know Riley Testut
Riley: Hey, y’all, I’m Riley Testut. I’m the developer of Delta, the video game emulator on iPhones, and also the creator of Alt Store, which is a whole separate thing that I created to distribute Delta before Apple allowed it in the App Store.
RD: Thank you for coming on, Riley. Obviously, Brandon and I use Delta on a regular basis, and we’re very happy to have you here. I’ve been checking out some of the stuff you’ve been working on when you were first getting started. Tell me a bit about Shoot Around and how that came about. I want to go back to the beginning. This is like your origin story.
Riley: So that was like when I first like I got my iPhone as a teenager, back when the iPhone 3G came out, and I fell in love with that thing. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. So I thought I could make an app for this because I like downloading all these other apps. It’s like, that’s kind of cool, I want to try it out. I had no programming experience whatsoever. But so i thought, let’s see what I can do, and so then I got some books to teach you programming and then I learned basics… and I was like ‘I just need an app idea.’
Riley: And then I was listening to a podcast one day and then they randomly mentioned ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to use your iPhone camera to look around, just shoot things virtually with like lasers.’ And I was like, ‘App idea, nailed it. I need that.’ And then I just turned that into like a thing. But my favorite part is I had no graphic design experience. I still don’t. But so everything, all the graphics in that were made with Microsoft Paint. Like I had an ‘A button’ that was a red circle with an A on it, had a blue circle etc. The lasers were like red and yellow diagonal pixel things, all in paint, all the app icons made in paint too.
Early Emulation Work
RD: What was your first dabble into emulating then? Talk to me about your emulation history, because this is what a wide number of our audience are probably most interested in. When did you first get interested in emulation?
Riley: So I’ve always been interested in emulation. I’ve used emulators throughout my childhood, honestly. Ever since I think I first discovered that it was a thing when I was 10 years old, I found that you could download emulators on the computer. I thought it was awesome. But I didn’t dabble in doing it myself for a while, because it was kind of just by happenstance. I was working on another app at the time, like another camera app.
Riley: And then I came across just some open source code for a jailbreak emitter called GPSP or GPS phone that people could use to jailbreak their iPhones and run Game Boy games. And so I just came across this code online. I was like, ‘Wait, hold on. This is a whole functioning app for jailbroken phones, but maybe I could tweak it and put it onto my own phone and change it around.’ And so I downloaded it. It didn’t compile at all, it had so many errors. And so I was like, really determined though. So I just tinkered away on it and got that basically to a really hacky version that could run Pokemon Emerald.
Riley: That’s the reason I did it. I like, just wanted to play Pokemon Emerald again on my phone. And so that was my determination. Then I installed my phone, and it worked. I put it on my friend’s phones at my high school and we’re all like, ‘This is pretty cool.’ We’re all just playing Pokemon and everything. And that was like really what it was for a while. It was just like me and my friends using it.
RD: You must have been so popular if you were the guy to go to to get Pokemon on your phone like ‘Yeah, come over here, I’ll sort you out!’
Riley: I was lucky that my high school, yeah, they did approve, they liked it. We had a nerdy high school. The band kids were cool, the film nerds were cool – it was cool to be a nerd, so it did work out.
The Birth Of GBA4IOS
RD: A lot of our readers will also know you from your work on GBA4iOS. Talk to us about how the idea evolved and how it led to you being so well known in the emulation scene.
Riley: So that’s, that’s what the Pokémon Emerald app ended up being. So I called it GBA4iOS just like internally to my, friends and that’s what it was. But then what made GBA4iOS take off more was I found a way basically to distribute it outside the app store, because I found a service where you could hook it up to what’s called an enterprise certificate. Trying not to be too technical, it meant that anyone could basically go to a website and then just install GBA4iOS from this website.
Riley: And it was that easy. And I was like, okay, I’ll set it up. I’ll see if there’s any demand for this thing. And then it turned out there was a lot of demand for that kind of thing. There were Reddit posts, people were making YouTube videos on installation tutorials. And I was like, ‘Okay, there’s a demand for this kind of thing. Maybe I should take it seriously.’
RD: What was it like discovering that there was so much interest? I mean, you put it up there, you wake up one day, then there’s two YouTube videos, then a week later there’s 200. What did that feel like from something that you just started? Because the way you’re talking about it, it doesn’t seem like there was much struggle. It was something fun, it sounded like it came quite easily. That must have been immense for you, right?
Riley: It was very surreal, it was amazing. I was seeing some people talk about playing games, but yeah, it was definitely a new scale. I was not used to seeing just articles come out; Time Magazine posted about GBA4iOS at one point. And I was like, wow. I was realising this was a really big deal, even bigger than I thought it would be when I was devoting time to it.
Delta & The Alt Store
RD: I would say that other than the Alt Store, your name is synonymous with the best emulator on the iPhone – Delta. How quickly did development on Delta happen after the success of GBA4iOS?
Riley: I pretty much went right into Delta right after GBA. I maybe had a few months off because I graduated high school the same year I released GBA. And so then I went into college. And so I was a little busy with college, like freshman year college at first. But by the end of my freshman year of college, I’d started just working on Delta. I needed a new project, but I didn’t actually realise Delta would be anything at the time. I made it because Swift had just been announced, Apple’s programming language.
RD: Usually when you don’t suspect something’s going to be a big thing it ends up being a global sensation. So you wanted to create something in Swift?
Riley: Yeah, I just wanted a cool little project for me to learn Swift in, and that’s what Delta was at first. And then I was just working on that for a bit over college. I didn’t want to have to deal with a lot of stuff with Apple – I just wanted to get it in the app store. And so after a year of working on Delta, this is around 2015, I went to WWDC and I talked to AppReview and asked if there any way I could get Delta in the app store at all And then they said ‘You know what… I think so. If you can work with us and basically give us an allowed list of games you want to allow every update, we can just make sure those games are safe for the app store. And then you can have it in there.’
Riley: They were just concerned about installing any potential games because they didn’t want any blowback. So I thought I would submit Delta to the App Store then just have an allowed list of games, and I worked on that for like a year before going back. And that’s when they said, ‘No, nevermind. You’re not allowed to put anything in the app store whatsoever. We do not allow emulators, period.’
RD: How odd! So what was their reasoning behind that? Because they are typically used illegally and unethically?
Riley: They never gave me a direct reason – that is the reason. It wasn’t advantageous for them to allow it because it would just threaten their relationship with Nintendo and other gaming companies for no benefit because there’s no money. Emulators do not make Apple money, so there was no reason to allow it. And I was like, ‘Well, this is stupid!’ I spent so much time working on Delta and Apple’s now saying it can’t be allowed.
Riley: I wanted to build something reliable, something that you could use that Apple wouldn’t be able to shut down. That was my goal. And that’s kind of how I ended up working on AltStore, which to put it really simply is just a way… it’s like a tool, a program that tricks your phone into thinking you are a developer, that you’re an Apple developer. And then you’re just installing your own apps onto your phone for free. Because Apple allows students to do this in college. And so I knew Apple allowed this, and I thought I could just make a tool that does this for you. And that would be the new way of installing Delta.
RD: So did you get any kind of pushback from doing it that way?
Riley: Pushback from Apple? No, they’ve never reached out to me, or at least before this year, about anything to do with AltStore officially. They would throw wrenches into what I was working on; they would shut down something I was relying on. So I’d have to quickly work around that to fix it in AltStore… but never official communication. And I think it helped that this is about the time that countries around the world were investigating Apple. And so I was kind of like, ‘I hope that I’m kind of just safe because it’d look really bad for Apple to come after Alt Store when they’re being investigated by everyone in the world right now.’ So I was kind of riding that line.
RD: What do you think’s changed in Apple’s eyes now that has allowed them to just welcome emulation?
Riley: It is entirely because we were about to launch AltStore in the EU with Delta as our main app. That was the reason. We had been working with them for months to launch Alt Store Pal as a variant in Europe and Delta was going to be our premier app and it still is. We had to be working with Apple back and forth a lot; they knew exactly what we were doing.
Riley: We told them what our plans were, and then we got to the weekend before we launched AltStore pal, and they have to approve all the apps that go through AltStore still. So we had been waiting for them to approve Delta for two months so that we could distribute it in our own store. We said ‘Apple, can you please approve Delta for our store, not for the App Store?’ And then the weekend before we were gonna launch, they changed the App Store rules to allow emulators and then approved our app, approved Delta for AltStore.
RD: And Delta has since become our go-to emulator and one of the most downloaded apps on the App Store. If I have Retro Arch and Delta next to each other, I’m mapping a controller into Delta and it’s super easy. If I’m using the N64 controls on Delta, it’s super easy. I have way less messing around to do. And I guess that’s why so many people are enjoying using Delta rather than a lot of the other emulators that have come out for iPhone because of these extra touches that you put in and because you are continually thinking about the end user and making it as easy and nostalgic for them as possible. So everything you’re doing is paying off and working.
Riley: I’m glad that you said that because I think that’s exactly it. That kind of experience to me honestly matters more than a lot of the more advanced emulation features. Not that those aren’t important, but that’s like where I started from. I was like ‘If I’m building an iPhone emulator, I feel like this is how it would be built.’
Riley: People on iPhone generally just want things to work, like they want us put in a ROM and it runs… and so that was very much a strong focus. But it does lead to certain debates of what emulators are better and then it’s kind of funny to see people just talk past each other about why their favourite emulator is the best. People just care about certain things and you can’t please everyone. And so that’s why it’s so good RetroArch is on the platform because it is the master class, but I kind of wanted to address the people that RetroArch wasn’t addressing, which I felt was a big demographic. And I would argue that it is the bigger demographic of the casual retro gamers than the people who are actually installing RetroArch. It’s just been too hard to do it until now.
RD: Yeah, 100%. My old man is 62 and wanted to get into playing old Zelda games on his phone. And this was years ago. I introduced him to RetroArch and he installed it and then instantly uninstalled it. And now I’ve told him about Delta and he’s starting to play around with that, so I completely agree.
The Time When Adobe’s Lawyers Came Knocking
RD: Now, let’s have a chat about you getting in a little bit of a pickle with Adobe – I bet you didn’t think that they would come knocking one day back when you were building GBA4iOS!
Riley: That’s just the most hilarious story. Yeah, this is shortly after we launched, when we were still in the backlog of trying to get on top of everything; support, fixing just everything etc. We were just so busy. And then I just got an email in our inbox, and it was something from Adobe’s lawyers.
RD: What happened there? Take us through the day you got that email.
Riley: They said ‘We’ve noticed that your app icon is very similar to ours’ and then posted a screenshot of our icon next to their Adobe icon. And I said ‘Yeah, they are very similar.’
RD: Yeah, but it’s such a vague shape. How do you like trade mark a triangle?
Riley: I know, it was so frustrating, but we were like there’s no winning this battle. We see it. When the lawyer sends you two images and they’re pretty identical, I’m like, ‘Okay, fine.’
RD: You can’t argue can you? As soon as the words ‘lawyer and identical’ are in there it’s easy to just to kind of say ‘Yeah that’s fine.’
Riley: Yeah, and so we were just like desperate to figure out what to do. And so that’s why we called our friend Caroline Moore. She does all the design for Delta and everything. She has all the skins, all the icon stuff. And so we called her up and we’re like, ‘We need a new icon very fast just to get Adobe like off of our asses right now.’ And then she was trying to be really creative and come up with a new icon just very quickly. And then we’re like, ‘No, it should be stupid, it should look really stupid. It should be clear that we are annoyed that we’re having to change this icon.’ She eventually just chopped the top off and we’re like ‘Nailed it. Perfect. That is exactly what we need!’
Thanks to Riley for joining us on the Retrospect Podcast for this interview. To find out more about Delta Multiplayer, AltStore, Riley’s dealings with Apple, and much more, then listen back to the full episode below! Don’t forget that you can grab our Retro Dodo Delta skin from our website for £2.99, with 100% of the profits going to charity!
