Thanks to the developer @hikari_no_yume's "ridiculous passion project", a Super Monkey Ball iOS game is finally available to play again, six years after the release of iOS 11 killed iPhone's 32-bit app support.
Hikari revealed the news in an incredible Twitter thread that we'll link to here that talks about how they first discovered the Super Monkey Ball iOS port in late 2008, through Sega's marketing at age 11 or 12, and how playing the game convinced them that "iPhone OS apps were the future of gaming."
As they admit later in the same thread, the future they envisioned didn't necessarily come to pass, with aggressive monetization becoming far more common in the App Store marketplace than quality premium titles like Other Ocean and Sega's Super Monkey Ball port, but the title stuck with them over the years. And so, in 2022, they set out to find a way to play it again, importing the game's binary into the reverse engineering framework Ghidra.
Now it appears that they've not only been successful in launching Super Monkey Ball but in creating a high-level emulator for other iPhone OS applications, meaning that future generations are now able to experience potentially tons of other outdated App Store games, for themselves. You can watch a video of the emulator in action below: