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Delta’s 10-year journey to the top of the App Store

Delta’s 10-year journey to the top of the App Store

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On The Vergecast: the rise of the emulator, the case for voice notes, and the point of AI gadgets.

By David Pierce, editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

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An image of the Delta emulator over a Vergecast logo.
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

Apparently only donuts could dethrone Delta from the top of Apple’s App Store. Before that, the game emulator had been the most popular app on iOS for two full weeks, after it launched in the wake of an unexpected Apple policy change that finally gave emulators the green light. But the Delta story actually goes back much further. Riley Testut, the developer behind the app, has been working on emulators for a decade, and he’s seen firsthand exactly how the App Store works — and how it’s changing.

On this episode of The Vergecast, Testut joins the show to tell us the full Delta story. He describes his early attempts at building emulators, the first time he almost made it onto the App Store, the process of building the alternative app store AltStore, what it was like to watch regulators around the world take aim at Apple, and much more.

After that, we break from our coverage of crappy AI gadgets to tell you about one genuinely cool use we’ve found for AI: voice notes. Whether you want to keep a diary, talk out your to-do list, or get automatic notes on all your phone calls, there are a bunch of good gadgets and apps that make transcription and summarization easy.

Finally, we answer a Rabbit-related question on the Vergecast Hotline about whether the AI gadgets should actually be gadgets at all.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with Delta:

And on AI voice notes:

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