Android Market's most popular emulators disappear without a trace

The emulators were created with code that was stolen. Google is simply cracking down on licensing violations. They're not taking a stance against emulation in general, or anything like that.<p>I'm sure that if you submitted an emulator that you actually wrote, rather than stealing, and sold it, it would stay up just fine.

The issue here is that the author here used the emulator code bases (from the Snes9x project and others) and tried to profit from them, which is probably against the license of the underlying code.<p>He didn't even release his source code, so he was in violation of the original license, but tried to profit from it anyways.

Google still has not replied to the complaints set out by the Android Developers Union - this is a clear example about why we need demand #5.<p><a href="http://www.andevuni.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.andevuni.org</a>

Yet Google can't remove the crapware and cull Market for apps that steal your data.<p>Not trolling here, I'm a happy Nexus S (and iPhone 4) owner.

The developer of PSX4Droid made it free but adsupported from his site. <a href="http://www.zodttd.com/wp/2011/04/psx4droid-3-0-0-is-out-download-here-self-published/" rel="nofollow">http://www.zodttd.com/wp/2011/04/psx4droid-3-0-0-is-out-down...</a> I don't like the removals, but I'm happy I can still sideload them without any issues.

The emulator apps have companion apps which download copyrighted ROMs for you. They push the download system in the emulator app description, as well as within the emulator itself. I wonder if that was the problem? Looking forward to the details.<p>I'm pretty annoyed with this, as I've purchased two of yongzh's apps, and don't have them installed on my phone currently - I was expecting to be able to reinstall them anytime.<p>So now Android has lost the two main things I liked, emulators and Grooveshark. If they're going to bring us all the bad things about Apple's system and none of the good, I might as well just get an iPhone next time. Or, if yongzh was infringing GPL as a few comments say, never mind! Hopefully someone normal will release these apps soon. There's plenty of emulator code out there to go by.

Everyone always goes overboard with their reaction to any app removal from the marketplace. I don't see what the big deal is, I'm glad to see Google keeping the market from being too dodgey. All of these "oh well this is pretty much Apple" comments are silly. If you are doing something illegal, you can distribute the .apk online, anything else can go on the market without a lengthy review process. It's worlds apart.

So, from Honeycomb onwards, Android is no longer open source aside from the places where they are forced to be (through the GPL), and the market is more of an Apple app store.<p>(or were there some copyright claims involved here? e.g. making a TI-89 emulator should be ok for the market, but you can't include TI's ROM)

I don't know if this is why, but my sales are up about 10% today over compared to the last week's average, so I don't know how niche this really was but my guess is that emulation may have been curbing the gaming needs of many. Not sure though.

Wow the comments on Engadget are amazingly stupid. Maybe i'm just spoiled.

So Android is basically giving up their biggest competitive advantage to iPhone gaming? Android's emulators always seemed to trump iPhones wider selection of native games.<p>This is almost certainly a result of the launch of Sony's Xperia aka Playstation Android phone. Can't you still just sideload the app?<p>Maybe Amazon's Android store will allow the emulators back in? Or will Google be able to block this?

It is obviously a copyright thing and they had to comply with removal requests.