The Delta Emulator is changing its logo after Adobe threatened it

Delta Emulator is abandoning its current logo for a different, yet-to-be-revealed mark — because Adobe thinks Delta’s stylized letter “D” is a bit too close to its stylized letter “A” for comfort.

It’s not every day you see an app changelog that includes news of a legal threat, but get a load of this:

The situation unfolded quickly, according to emails Delta creator Riley Testut shared with The Verge:

On May 7th, Adobe’s lawyers reached out to Delta with a firm but kindly written request to go find a different icon, an email that didn’t contain an explicit threat or even use the word infringement — it merely suggested that Delta might “not wish to confuse consumers or otherwise violate Adobe’s rights or the law.”

But Adobe didn’t wait for a reply. On May 8th, one day later, Testut got another email from Apple that suggested his app might be at risk because Adobe had reached out to allege Delta was infringing its intellectual property rights.

“We responded to both Apple and Adobe explaining our icon was a stylized Greek letter delta — not an A — but that we would update the Delta logo anyway to avoid confusion,” Testut tells us.

The icon you’re seeing on the App Store now is just a temporary one, he says, as the team is still working on a new logo. “Both the App Store and AltStore versions have been updated with this temporary icon, but the plan is to update them to the final updated logo with Delta 1.6 once it’s finished.”

Adobe does have one logo that’s pretty similar to Delta’s, and all of Adobe’s logos contain stylized triangles with an almost identically shaped gap. They’ve had such a gap since 1982 when Marva Warnock, the wife of company co-founder John Warnock, first designed the mark.

But Adobe adopted a negative space version of the logo in 1993 and has used it ever since, one that’s harder to confuse with Delta:

I certainly didn’t think of Adobe when I first saw Delta’s logo.