Kongregate CEO Jim Greer has responded to Google pulling its Kongregate Arcade app from the Android store this week. Released yesterday, the app was on the store a few hours before Google decided to yank it without much explanation. Greer called Google's swift removal of the app "surprising," noting that he showed the app to several people at Google, and that they seemed to approve of it at the time. Greer did acknowledge that the person at Google who made the decision to yank the app had not seen it prior to its release.
"The reason for the removal," Greer said, "and we didn't find out until after it was already gone, was that they claim you can't use their app store to distribute another app store -- which is a reasonable restriction. But to us, what's really bizarre, to call [Kongregate Arcade] an 'app store' seems like a pretty extreme stretch."
The Kongregate App is simply a portal to Kongregate's games site for mobile devices (m.kongregate.com) offering around 300 games. These games are essentially played in a browser - enabled using the Android browser and WebKit. Greer went on to say that most Android app removals involved fraud, piracy, or other nefarious activities. He also cited examples like Game Boy emulators that are available today via the Marketplace that walk the line.
"Our understanding is that this wasn't even a gray area; that it was totally fine," he said in closing. "And that's why we're so surprised."
Google has not publicly commented on why it pulled the app.
Source: Joystiq
Comments
Re: Kongregate CEO 'Shocked' by Android App Removal
Anyone who uses Kongregate regularly knows that they are now owned by GameStop. Perhaps Google pulled the app because of that relationship? I'm still leery about the Kong/GameStop relationship myself - it could literally go anywhere and more than likely down the wrong path.
Also a possibility: If even one of the 300 mobile games has "pay-for" hooks in it, it probably qualifies as breaking the "app store in an app store" rule.
- Left4Dead
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Re: Kongregate CEO 'Shocked' by Android App Removal
Indeed a very bizarre situation.
This part is spot on:
"The Kongregate App is simply a portal to Kongregate's games site for mobile devices (m.kongregate.com) offering around 300 games. These games are essentially played in a browser - enabled using the Android browser and WebKit."
This can be done on stock android, it's just a simple app that downloads the .swf to the SD card then opens it*
Hopefully This'll be something they'll change their minds on, as random banning from the appstore like this is one of my most hated points of Apple's ecosystem.
Still, on a plus point we can still download it from their website (direct from the android device too) and install it anyway.
*any android owners that wish to do this manually, just save a flash file on your SD card and add this as a browser favourite:
content://com.android.htmlfileprovider/sdcard/flashfilenamehere.swf
Re: Kongregate CEO 'Shocked' by Android App Removal
Anti-competitive much Google?
-Greevar
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