TL;DR: A clever two-piece iPhone case with real physical buttons that simulate touch inputs, turning Delta into a genuine retro handheld. Nearly flawless performance, great nostalgia factor, no MagSafe support, awesome price. A must-have for Game Boy kids turned iPhone adults.

There’s a very specific sound that lives rent-free inside my skull: the plasticky click of a Game Boy Color’s A button. It’s the sound of entire summers spent ignoring sunscreen warnings, chugging Capri Suns, and grinding through Pokémon battles on road trips that I definitely didn’t pack enough AA batteries for.

So when Apple finally loosened its iron grip on emulator apps last year and Delta strutted onto the App Store like a long-lost friend, I felt the gravitational pull instantly. Suddenly, my iPhone wasn’t just a glass rectangle for doomscrolling — it became a portal back to those 8-bit and 16-bit afternoons I once engineered my entire schedule around.

But touchscreens? Look, I appreciate haptic feedback as much as the next nerd, but tapping virtual buttons never hits the same. It’s like eating pizza with a fork. Technically functional. Spiritually incorrect.

Which is why, when I wandered across the GAMEBABY case — glowing in its retro white-and-beige outfit like a cousin of the original Game Boy who moved to Tokyo to study design — I felt the kind of magnetic nostalgia that could bankrupt me in an instant. I knew I needed to touch it. And then I did. And then I refused to put it down.

This is the story of how my iPhone temporarily stopped being a productivity device and fully relapsed into childhood.

What the GAMEBABY Actually Is (and Isn’t)

The GAMEBABY, despite the flashy name, is shockingly analog. There’s no Bluetooth pairing ritual. No proprietary firmware that needs weekly updates. No battery to charge. It is literally just a two-piece phone case with physical buttons on the bottom half — buttons that exist solely to poke your touchscreen with a kind of stylus material that mimics the glorious chaos of your thumbs.

And honestly? That’s the magic.

No cables. No latency. No menus. Just physical inputs, faithfully tricking your iPhone into thinking your fingers have acquired newfound precision.

The top half of the case holds your camera cutout. The bottom half — when flipped and slid into place — turns your phone into something that looks like the lost love child of a Game Boy Pocket and a 2025 iPhone. The plastic is lightweight but confident, with black buttons that feel like the designers spent a weekend cosplaying as 90s Nintendo engineers. The shell screams vintage optimism rather than “yet another phone case trying too hard.”

Inside, beneath every button, little black pads lie in wait. You press down, they tap your screen. It’s so simple that it feels rebellious, like a hack that somehow escaped Cupertino’s notice.

The Delta Emulator + GAMEBABY Combo Is the Real Dream Team

Here’s where everything clicks — metaphorically and literally.

Delta’s emulator already lets you load custom skins, including full Game Boy layouts. GAMEBABY includes a QR code in the box that downloads a perfectly aligned skin designed for its physical buttons. Without that skin, the whole system collapses like a poorly drawn platformer map.

But once the skin is installed? Chef’s kiss.

The moment I set it up, the muscle memory kicked in. The buttons aren’t mushy. They don’t wobble. They strike the touchscreen with the kind of consistency that makes you forget it’s all a low-tech illusion. You still get haptic feedback from the iPhone, which adds this strange hybrid sensation — half retro handheld, half futuristic phone pretending to be retro handheld.

In hours of testing, I only had one missed input — which, frankly, mirrors my real-life Game Boy experience. The original hardware didn’t always acknowledge your existence either.

There’s one compromise worth mentioning: the two-piece nature of the case and its bottom-module design kills MagSafe compatibility. Completely. Not “inconsistent.” Not “reduced.” Just gone. If your lifestyle is held together by a MagSafe wallet or dashboard mount, you’ll be making tradeoffs.

But for gaming? For nostalgia? For subway rides where I don’t want to cry-scroll email? Totally worth it.

It’s Weirdly Liberating to Use a Phone Case With No Electronics in It

I can’t stress this enough: nothing about this product should work. We live in an era where kettles have firmware updates. A passive mechanical phone case feels like it belongs in a museum labeled “Technology We Lost Along the Way.”

And yet the GAMEBABY works better than half the Bluetooth accessories I’ve reviewed this decade.

There’s a joy in its simplicity — a pure, almost defiant refusal to complicate the relationship between player and game. Instead of inventing new tech, it leans on the oldest trick in the book: pushing something onto something else to make a thing happen.

It’s practically philosophical.

Price, Availability, and the Joy of Low-Tech Gifts

Maybe the most shocking part is the price: $39.99. That’s cheaper than many regular iPhone cases — including the ones that do nothing but turn yellow after six months.

The yellow version is available for the iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max.

The white and grey retro version is available for iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max.

Who’s this for you ask? A retro-gaming friend. A sibling. A coworker who still insists Pokémon peaked on the Game Boy Advance. Or, honestly… yourself.

Especially yourself.

Verdict

The GAMEBABY case isn’t trying to replace the Switch or resurrect the Game Boy. It’s simply trying to give you back something your modern smartphone quietly erased: the tactile joy of real buttons.

It succeeds more beautifully than I expected. It’s simple, clever, nostalgic, and fun — and it turns Delta into the handheld console experience I was craving. The lack of MagSafe support is a real limitation, but for portable retro gaming, this thing absolutely rules.