Yongzh, the developer of the most popular emulators on the Android Market, has be completely shut down. The hints that this was going to happen have been coming over the course of the past couple of month with the odd emulator being pulled here and there. Now, a total crackdown has happened.
Yongzh has developed all of the most popular emulators for Android that span a variety of console systems from Nintendo to Sega and everything in between. As of yesterday though, Google has taken some pretty drastic steps when it comes to Yongzh and his emulators. In fact every single one of them were pulled from the Android Market and his developer account has been closed. If you own any of his emulators, you are probably a little worried now as to support for them. Well there is good news regarding that which we will get to in a minute.
There are various rumors going around as to why this has happened with all of his emulators. While there are reports that Yongzh continually refused to follow the open source licensing requirements for his emulators, others are suggesting that it is more of a legal issue with how the ROMs for use with his emulators were being distributed. The way his emulators worked were that it used ROMs that circumvented any sort of copyright protection, thus meaning you would have to have a pirated copy of a game to play it on his emulators. Using ROMs with emulators is fine, legally, if you own a copy of the game already. If you don’t then it is illegal. Holding the emulator responsible for that is a bit of a stretch though.
Regardless of the reasons why, Google has decided to take action and completely remove all of his emulators from the Android Market. As we mentioned earlier though, there is a ray of light in this dark tunnel. Yongzh, for the time being, has uploaded his emulators for free (temporarily) to SlideME which is a fairly large 3rd party app store for Android. This will allow existing customers to get updates without having to pay for the emulators a second time. This will probably only be a temporary solution until some other means of distribution is found where people who don’t have his emulators already are not able to get them for free.
When more information becomes available, we will be sure to update everyone.
Website Referenced: Engadget
SlideME Market Link: Yongzh Emulators
