Creators — Riley Testut

An interview with a film-loving, self-made app developer

Ever wished you could play classic Pokémon games on your iPhone?
Riley Testut is an app developer, entrepreneur, and USC student who made that possible. What started as an effort to learn about Swift resulted in an iPhone application that was downloaded by millions, head-to-heads with Nintendo and Apple, and the start of Riley’s career as an entrepreneur.
We sat down with Riley to learn more about his story, challenges he’s faced, and his advice for other aspiring entrepreneurs. Feel free to check out his website at: rileytestut.com or read more about him and GBA4iOS here:

So I guess just tell me about your projects and what you’ve been working on, what you have worked on…

I’ve been an iOS developer since I was in 7th grade. I would always make my own random apps, like a camera app, and then one day I came across this code on GitHub that was a GameBoy Advance emulator. I was like, ‘Oh, this can be kind of cool,’ if I could somehow turn this into an app I could just play or put on my friends’ phones. So I downloaded it and tried to fiddle around with it to get it to work, which took a long time to do because it was very broken and outdated. But I got that, gave it to some of my friends, and we were like, ‘This is really cool, we can play Pokémon on our phones.’ That’s all I ever meant it to be. I put it up, thinking it would be a good way to promote the other apps I was making, and it just became way more popular than I ever imagined. Apparently people wanted to play Pokémon on their phones. I found a way to distribute it to anyone using an enterprise certificate, which basically meant I could distribute to anyone without

having another device. It’s meant for companies to give apps to their employees — I just used it to give it to anyone. From then, literally anyone could go to my website and download the app, and then Apple shut that down. But then people discovered that if you set your date back by 24 hours, you could actually continue to install the app, even after Apple shut it down. Once I’d learned that, I started to completely rewrite the whole app from scratch, because the first version was very hacky — it was just meant for me and my friends. I spent 7–9 months working on it, released it again, and that was the GBA4iOS that most people know today. I built up a lot of hype around it, people could download it, set the date back, and it was very successful and all because I randomly found someone’s code online that I could turn into something cool.

And you’re working on something similar now, right?

Right. So, from GBA, I got interested in the whole emulation thing. I was trying to come up with other apps, and eventually I came up with this new idea — well, kind of new idea. Basically, to do GBA4iOS, but turn it into much more. Not just GameBoy Advance games. I wanted to support Super Nintendo games, Nintendo 64 games, and in the future, like, NES games, and have every classic console on your phone. So, I started working on that freshman year of college in my free time. Honestly, it was just supposed to help me learn Swift. Swift had just been announced, so I wanted to have a project to work on so I could learn everything about it. Then, when I was working on it, I became way more excited about it, and decided to turn it into an actual project. So, it’s been, like, 3 years in the making — yeah, wow — or, …math — 2 years in the making, and I’m hoping to release it soon. It’s written entirely in Swift, and it’ll support all Nintendo classic games.

Would you consider yourself to be an entrepreneur?

I guess I would consider myself to be an entrepreneur, but all unintentionally. I never sought out to build a business, when I think of the beginning. I just wanted to make apps. I thought that was really cool. I wanted to program. Once my apps became really popular, it kind of started

this whole, like, people knew me and my name, and that was really weird, and I knew from that I could launch other apps. I do consider [myself to be], but not in the traditional way of, like, I set out to build a business. I just set out to make stuff and now that I know I have that infrastructure, I can release new products under my name.

So what was the biggest obstacle you would say that you faced?

There were 3 main ones that I had to overcome with GBA that stick out to me.

The first one was, once GBA4iOS had become really popular, Nintendo sent a DMCA notice, which is basically like a cease and desist, telling us to shut it down. We were kind of terrified, because we didn’t know what to do when a huge company like Nintendo says, like, ‘Hey, yo, stop this.’ Thankfully, my friend’s dad was an IP lawyer. We met with him, and he was able to explain, it’s just a scare tactic, you’re using their logos in your app, but if you remove all the logos, you’ll be fine. They can’t do anything about it. So we removed all Nintendo logos, any trace of anything that could be copyrighted, and, sure enough, they never came after us again after that.

Second one was, in our app, we linked people to a site to download games, which was kind of not the best idea because that’s kind of facilitating piracy. A prominent developer of another emulator for Mac, called OpenEmu, looked through our code and thought that we had a special partnership with this website that we would receive, like, some revenue from ads and stuff, which we hadn’t — we hadn’t, this was, like, not true at all, but he went public with this and tried to claim that we were lying to all of our users and earning money secretly, and illegally, and we had to go out and be like, ‘No, we’re not doing this right now,’ — when I say we, I mean my partner, Paul, if I haven’t mentioned that yet — so we were being publicly accused of stuff we weren’t doing. This was a prominent developer, so we didn’t know what to do. Eventually we wrote a blog post and put all the proof out there of how we’re not doing this for all these reasons. People believed me, and we never heard from him since. He still hates me to this day, actually. When Delta was posted about on Reddit, he was in the comments of some Reddit thread talking about how much of a crap developer I was. I was like, it’s been like, 3 years since GBA was released, this is ridiculous. That was the most annoying one.

The final: Apple eventually shut us down, because they fixed the workaround where you could set the date back one day. Which makes sense, but that one, we couldn’t really overcome. That was it for GBA. Oh, well.

What is a common misconception about entrepreneurship or creation that you would like to clarify?

Entrepreneurship is not just, you make a startup and you do all the business stuff first. You can launch with just a product, and just make something and turn that into a business. Which I think has a lot of benefits in a lot of ways. I don’t know how well that works out in practice, but for me that’s just the route of taking it by accident, but I like that much more than trying to build a whole structure around an app. That way, if you build the whole structure and the app fails, the company itself just goes under. But if you build a product for yourself, it’s not as dangerous.

So I guess your experience is with smaller teams ­–

Definitely.

Do you think that that’s — that’s obviously a good thing in your mind.

I really like it, because I personally don’t like being a part of bigger teams where I don’t have as much say over the product. Then I just feel like a cog in a machine. But when you’re part of a small team, you all can work together to come up with really great ideas and share and it’s more collaborative, so I really feel like small teams can come up with the best ideas. Now, you could argue, maybe bigger teams actually implement all that, but, when you’re starting something, yeah. A smaller team of people that know each other and are comfortable around each other to speak freely is a really nice environment.

Have you run into problems where you have such a small team that there’s something that somebody doesn’t know how to do? Like, how do you handle that situation?

I haven’t personally had that, mostly because of luck. Any situation one of the people would be able to step up and learn it. Or, when I’m doing indie stuff, it’ll mostly be like, ‘Oh, this will be a cool experience for me to learn this new thing.’ I love being indie because I learn so many new skills I wouldn’t have learned already, just because I’m passionate about it, so I’m willing to learn.

You’re into film too, right?

Yes, very into film.

Tell me a little bit about that.

My family always just loved taking us to the movies, it would always just be a fun thing we would do often. Then, I went to a magnet high school, so we had special programs you could apply for, and my sister applied for the film program — she’s 2 years older than me — and she got in and she loved it, so I thought it would be really cool to be part of this program. So I applied, got in, and then for 4 years I learned the complete fundamentals of film, editing, directing, acting, and stuff like that. Every 6 weeks we’d do a new movie and then present it to the class. I fell in love with it. We could be so creative, and

do it however we wanted, and sometimes they’d be structured, like we had to say these 2 quotes, we had to use this prop, we had to use this element, and come up with a cool thing, or we’d have competitions. Just doing all that was a really nice way for me to show my creativity and work with people, and make cool things to showcase to other people. It actually goes back to app-making, or anything I do; I love to see people be excited about what I build or do, so showing my movies to people and they’d be like, ‘Wow, this is great,’ — that was also really fun. Or, also sometimes it didn’t come out well, and it’d be like, ‘Oh well, it was fun to make it.’

What was the most valuable thing you think you learned from being involved with film?

You need to let people do what they’re best at. I learned a lot of teamwork from that, because when you’re building a film you need to have people dedicated to directing, people dedicated to camerawork — you can’t do everything. It won’t work well. I learned a lot of team skills from that.

If you could wake up tomorrow having gained one quality or ability, what would it be?

Can I say flying? That would be great.

Say flying.

Besides that though. I definitely have a lot of faults. I guess being able to not take things personally. That’s something you should be able to do, and I try to, but still, having people not like my stuff does get to me, so it’d be nice if I could completely get rid of that.

What was a time you failed?

I can list my first app. It was an app where you could shoot people with virtual lasers. It didn’t do well at all, but it was also just, like, an awful app. It was horrible. Horrendous. And also, for a long time I was working on this email app, like to treat email more like Twitter. We had a lot of great ideas for it, but then it’s been on and off again for, like, 7 years or something. Just a long time. And we just were never able to figure out exactly how we wanted to do it. So I guess that could be a failure. Also, my partner Paul went to Africa for his Mormon mission. So he’s no longer here and can’t help with it.

What would you say the best piece of advice you’ve ever received was?

I don’t remember who said it, but it’s like, don’t take shit from anybody. Basically, people are going to hate on you, people are going to try to make your life not great, but you gotta filter that out and focus instead on what you’re doing and on all the people that are actually very happy. Like, along the way releasing, when I had just pushed back the release date of GBA, people were very upset, but more people were also very happy that I was still working, I was still excited for it. Filter out the people that are upset and stay focused on making the rest of the people happy.

What advice would you give to someone else who’s attempting something similar?

Basically, if you really care about it, stay focused on it. I think when you have a pet project or something like this you’re actually passionate about, you’re able to overcome a lot more obstacles than you would if you were just working on it for someone else. Like, I was really passionate about developing this app for people, so I found ways to distribute it to people or to work around Nintendo’s requirements and stuff like that. But if you’re not as passionate about it, you may give up — or, it may seem like it’s worthwhile to give up — and it may be, to give up early. But, yeah. If you’re passionate about it, just keep working on it, and you’ll figure out a solution.