thank you for the complimentary

Oliver may have a monomachine or Elektron use nanoloop

pardon?

I guess I figure that even if I end up not liking it in the long term, the residual value seems to stay high on these things

a good point.. chip gear usually tends to hold its value or go up

Nanoloop on iOS is fantastic and worth way more than its cost (in my opinion) for making all sorts of different styles of electronic music once you learn the many ins and outs of the software and realize just how much you can really do

Interesting. I feel this way about nanoloop 2; with it I've managed to make stuff that sounds like it was made on high-end digital synths. My nanoloop tracks sit nicely in a playlist with my monomachine tracks—in fact, the few times I've synced the two, it's been difficult to tell which machine is which.

So, my music kind of sucks I guess but the project I did was a bass CD (if you ever were familiar with the Bass Mekanik era where chest rattling car audio was a thing.) Just check it out:
http://bitpusher2600.net/g33k.html
The entire thing was produced purely in Nanoloop. You get simulate a chipish sound alongside more common electronic instrumentation (such as my tune Bassik Protocol) or pitch bend a couple samples and tweak timing (such as my tune Moonlit Bass which gives a small spectrum of piano notes.)

So there's that. Long story short; Nanoloop on iOS is fantastic and worth way more than its cost (in my opinion) for making all sorts of different styles of electronic music once you learn the many ins and outs of the software and realize just how much you can really do (the learning curve of getting the most out of it isn't what I'd call small.) If however you're wanting to make straight Gameboy music, this works practically nothing like the Gameboy relase whatsoever. Yeah there's a grid of squares that represents a step sequencer, but how the two work and getting around the software, nothing alike.

Sequencer step control is one-dimensional on iOS, with continuous fading, while it's two-dimensional with discrete steps on Game Boy. The latter is more comfortable, it provides the feeling of "grip" that is typical for nanoloop and can't be ported to iOS.

And "step pause", a very useful feature introduced in 1.7 / 2.7 is currently missing on iOS.

What do you mean there are no instruments . Like no samples?. Any synth / drum / noise you make on the gameboy is considered an instrument in my book...

[Am speaking off 1.x game boy version]

Well, no you can't use samples. But What I mean is that in the iOS version, each channel has  its own instrument settings that don't change. You can just plonk down notes and get the same sound over and over. LSDJ had the idea of instruments at its core, as well. In the game boy version nanoloop, you create kick drums by fiddling with the pitch settings in the pulse channel's sequencer. It's just a different way of working.

No, not at all, 1x and 2x are much much nicer to use... Except nl1.1/1.2 and nl 2.01/2.1

nothing bad about using 1.1 or 1.2 really, just one fewer channel and some things work differently than newer 1.x versions.... dealing with their batteries was a pain in the ass though