Drastic DS Emulator Pulled from Google Play Store

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dsemu.drastic&hl=en&gl=US

by tosh • 4 years ago

148 93 4 years ago

play.google.com

dindresto2• 4 years ago

Can't even access it as someone who bought the app... That's really unfortunate.

mastazi• 4 years ago

You will probably have to uninstall the Google Play version and reinstall through sideloading

kragen2• 4 years ago

Are you saying that you have the app previously installed on your phone, and it has ceased to work on that same phone, even though you didn't do something like a restore-from-backup in the interim? That's my interpretation of your comment but I could be misreading you.

dindresto2• 4 years ago

No it works on devices where I still have it installed :) just meant I can't install it from the store, which is different from Steam where you are still able to install games you bought even if their store page got taken down

ktzar• 4 years ago

Is there a way to request your money back? I'm surprised Google can just pull an app you've payed for. But well... Ts&Cs you never read.

josephcsible3• 4 years ago

If there were, I'm sure they'd do something horribly mean like force the refund to come out of the developer's pockets, even though the reason the refund is necessary is 100% Google's fault.

tasha0663• 4 years ago

I think this is part of why they make it so damn hard to find apps you already bought or downloaded before. AFAIK there's no way to search these, just a huge list to scroll through in no identifiable order, and anything that was removed or incompatible with the current device just isn't there.

smoldesu2• 4 years ago

I wonder if this is because of BIOS licensing. I haven't used Drastic in a while, but I do know that "perfect" DS emulation requires a couple files that are only available by dumping from your own machine... Nintendo has been on a copright troll-roll with the recent GilvaSunner takedowns, I almost wonder if this is part of that initiative.

In any case, this is another one for the "why sideloading is important" wall, it shouldn't be too big of a deal since the Drastic developers can continue distribution with or without Google's blessing. No Bleem! politics here, just a little bit of downtime so the devs can set up their own payment portal and dump the credentials of their paid customers for continued support. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if they just open sourced the thing and threw it to the community. DS emulators are a dime a dozen these days, and the devs have probably already made their money here. Any way it breaks, it should be a win-win situation though.

Gigachad• 4 years ago

It's been a very long time since I used Drastic but I remember it being vastly better than the other emulators at the time. Was the only one able to run DS games at full speed on my 2012 Nexus 7. The open source alternatives may have caught up by now though.

asiekierka• 4 years ago

Drastic had its own, recently open-sourced, reimplementation of the BIOS which claimed to be clean-room.

smoldesu2• 4 years ago

interesting! I've got a lot of respect for anyone who can pull that off from scratch.

charcircuit4• 4 years ago

Nintendo has been on a copright troll-roll with the recent GilvaSunner takedowns

That was not done by Nintendo, but rather someone impersonating Nintendo.

Dylan16807• 4 years ago

What's the latest evidence?

Last I saw there were suspicions but an official YouTube twitter account said it was really Nintendo.

trollied• 4 years ago

The developer is also missing: https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Exophase

Must have been banned.

Reddit thread discussing this: https://www.reddit.com/r/EmulationOnAndroid/comments/sx1tzw/...

endisneigh8• 4 years ago

Interestingly there's a Web Assembly port of DeSmuME (https://github.com/44670/desmume-wasm), so it works (to a certain extent) entirely in a web browser. You can ban from the stores, but as long as browsers are allowed, it'll never be banned completely.

The greatest scam of Google and Apple is convincing millions of developers to learn Swift and Kotlin to make apps on their stores that can be swiftly (pun intended) removed from their stores. Though the average developer is unlikely to ever be banned, why even risk it?

Think about the performance hit of apps that don't need to be native apps being ported to Web Apps. Let's be extreme and say it's equivalent to a Native App for a device 10 years older. Alright, so a modern Web App is equivalent in performance to a 2012 Native App running on a flagship. That's iPhone 5 and Galaxy Note 2. Make this conversion once and optimize your app and you'll never need to worry about your app being pulled ever again. Not to mention you can write your app once and it'll work on all platforms.

At least in the case of this particular app it can be sideloaded, so it'll be fine in the end, probably.

bogwog5• 4 years ago

The solution isn’t for everyone to make web apps, it’s to regulate the app markets.

Web apps are still at the mercy of Apple and Google. Plus, they’re always lagging in features. Wordle for example wouldn’t have been able to implement the sharing feature before ~2019 because the web share API wasn’t supported by major browsers (even though it’s a thing native apps could do since forever)

endisneigh8• 4 years ago

The solution isn’t for everyone to make web apps, it’s to regulate the app markets.

I'm not really seeing how regulation would really fix the scenario in the OP. What regulations that are likely to pass would prevent Apple and Google from removing apps arbitrarily?

Web apps are still at the mercy of Apple and Google.

Not really. Apple and Google don't control the entire internet. Though they do have some level of control of the APIs available, ultimately they themselves use the same APIs as well, so...

In any case I disagree with you - web apps are the solution because every app that becomes a Web App instead of native app results in a loosening in the grip that is the Apple/Google duopoly. Once at a critical mass, sites will pop up to curate all of these new found web apps, APIs will be developed to facilitate payments for these apps, and so forth.

Ironically Google initially was not able to compete with Apple with respect to app store curation and promoted PWAs aggressively, but no one really bit. If people just went with that to begin with we wouldn't be in this situation now. So instead of going with PWAs, Google just ended up copying Apple and now both of them just rent seek instead of one.

Prior to PWAs, there were "responsive pages" and Steve Jobs in 2007 actually thought that it would make more sense of all iPhone apps were just responsive apps instead of native apps, and locked down the API to strictly first party apps.

Hackers jail broke the iPhone to unlock all of the functionality, forcing Apple to launch the App Store, resulting in the situation now before us.

We're being given a second chance here with WebAssembly. Let's not screw it up this time around, ya?

lucaaa• 4 years ago

Wordle could have used copy to clipboard or link to share eg. Twitter https://twitter.com/home?status=blabla

dmix2• 4 years ago

You really think those regulations won’t be heavily lobbied by Nintendo and DRM loving lawyers, and somehow end up even worse for consumers or more importantly small developers?

Maybe I’m cynical but I highly doubt it’s going to be “make your app stores completely replaceable without DRM/billing/taxation/etc schemes and allow unrestricted sideloading”.

kevinslashslash• 4 years ago

The greatest scam of Google and Apple is convincing millions of developers to learn Swift and Kotlin to make apps on their stores that can be swiftly (pun intended) removed from their stores

I certainly won't defend Apple and Google's app store monopolies and control. However, Kotlin was actually a case of Google listening to the developer community. Google could have, and wanted to, push Dart (see Flutter) on Android. But the Android development community was already adopting JetBrain's Kotlin. Google listened and embraced Kotlin instead of pushing their own thing. It was not a hostile act.

Larrikin3• 4 years ago

Dare I say Google embracing and pushing Kotlin on the Android ecosystem was the last good thing I can remember Google doing. The language is such a joy to to work in without the pitfalls that come with Scala

CSMastermind• 4 years ago

Is Dart dead yet?

I narrowly won an argument with an evangelical principal engineer who wanted our whole company to switch to Dart around 7 years ago.

pjmlp2• 4 years ago

If Google actually listened to the Java developer community, they would have kept Java up to date instead of doing their own version of .NET.

Naturally after showing the finger to Sun and Oracle, "Android.NET" is the way.

saurik• 4 years ago

I don't think the point was Kotlin and Swift vs. Java and Objective-C, but merely these native languages (listing the current generation) instead of, say, JavaScript.

pinephoneguy2• 4 years ago

I remember the DS being my most capable portable computer. Seeing an emulator for it in the browser feels weird.

(also, more on topic for your comment): Going the browser route now (counter intuitively) gives you more flexibility with language/tooling. I think as far as cooperate/closed source apps go the browser is absolutely the way to go. It's a very battle hardened sandbox and the W3c does a pretty good job accumulating portable standards for things. It even has push notifications and file I/O now (although Apple has been stingy with that.)

rendall• 4 years ago

What was this app meant to do?

haunter• 4 years ago

Nintendo DS emulator

fartcannon• 4 years ago

Nintendo as a brand is dead to me.

Larrikin3• 4 years ago

They seem very polarizing to the adult community. I loved video games from all kinds of companies when I was younger and had hours a day to play games. But as an adult I can't imagine buying a non Nintendo system. The few hours a month when I actually want to play video games and have the time I'd rather load up some guaranteed fun, versus sit through huge chunks of AAA game story plot points just to shoot the Nazis, monster, etc or spend those same hours researching indie games that might be as fun as whatever Nintendo has put out recently.

Only thing really worth taking the risk on these days is music games, but the good ones are few and far between. The international Bemani community has seemingly fully committed to the arcade rip and Konami doesn't seem to care to try and bring them back to the home console since they aren't cutting into arcade unit sales.

kcindric• 4 years ago

Yes. As I grow older I'm more drawn to Nintendo ecosystem than any other due to games that are so much packed with fun and pretty immediate in their delivery.

pinephoneguy2• 4 years ago

I've always loved Nintendo. My only complaint right now is how hard it is to play homebrew and online games on the same switch, I guess I can afford to just buy a second one though.

iypx2• 4 years ago

I guess it's a cultural thing + buyer's remorse or how you call it, since that's what you've been exposed to for the most of your life.

I grew up in the other part of the world, the only popular games being Quake 1/2/3, Half Life, Star Craft +BW, Diablo 1/2+LoD, Red Alert, CS and later Lineage 2. I have no recollection of Nintendo at all. It was non existent in this part of the world (except the "Dendy", the bootleg hardware clone of NES for us, we all played mario and mortal kombat for a while, but then it died just as quick as it appeared).

Looking at Nintendo games now, I could see why they might be popular with younger kids, buy I'll never buy into the fact that an adult might like them, that just seems like some advertising ...

Today I can't even imagine not gaming on a computer, both AAA, indie games and big name games are shit though.

wnevets• 4 years ago

and yet the Beijing 2022 Games[1] app with known security vulnerabilities [2] is still on the Google Play Store.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.systoon.do...

[2] https://citizenlab.ca/2022/01/cross-country-exposure-analysi...

lelandbatey• 4 years ago

I wonder why it was this specific Nintendo DS emulator that was banned? Other Nintendo DS emulators such as vDS[0] are still available.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.icorewwwi....

ranger_danger• 4 years ago

Please don't use vDS, it's an illegal ripoff of Drastic, which is closed-source.

hd4• 4 years ago

Drastic is due to be added to RetroArch as a new core, so it's not all bad I guess.

https://www.drastic-ds.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=13901&start=1...

Shadonototra2• 4 years ago

i once thought of purchasing an android based handheld console like the ayn odin, i'm now more convinced the Steam Deck is the perfect choice, linux to the rescue, as always

charcircuit4• 4 years ago

Android uses Linux too.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 4 years ago

GNU/Linux, then? That's still not quite right - Alpine is perfectly good - but I'm not aware of a nice short term for "user-respecting open source unixy system".

Shadonototra2• 4 years ago

android is not the same thing, and this news doesn't encourage me to depend on them

staticman2• 4 years ago

Not sure if this is relavant but the app was last updated April 4 2020 according to a post on the Drastic forum. Development may not have been active anymore.

pmarreck3• 4 years ago

One day Nintendo will realize that the only way their IP will be truly preserved in the future is by DRM-breaking law-breaking rabid digital archivists who are seemingly more intent on getting their old titles running on newer hardware than Nintendo themselves are.

I mean seriously... quick, someone tell me which emulator of old hardware or software was actually supported in any way by the original creator of said hardware or software?

tsol• 4 years ago

Not trying to sound like a jerk, but do they care? It'll take away from their money made on remastering old classics for new machines. I wonder how much Nintendo as a company really cares about this stuff, as in the unprofitable sentimental stuff

TillE• 4 years ago

Nintendo already has developed their own emulators for various platforms. For example, the one for SNES is called Canoe, it was used for the SNES Classic (just a little ARM Linux box), and now on the Switch.

iypx2• 4 years ago

Yes, I really wanted to buy something like that, the first time I heard about it.

But then, looking through stores, seeing these second-hand mini-sneses being at least 35 pounds, sometimes up to 100, even though I could definitely afford one while I was working full time in UK, just kinda left a really bitter taste in mouth.

Really? Are they really milking everything out of us? I had for a while forgot what name emulator on my phone I wanted to play some pokemon, worked fine. Why would they want to price their devices so high? Just because people can afford it?

I refuse to buy it, it's that simple.

sb057• 4 years ago

They already realized it over twenty years ago when they hired the developer of the iNES format for Animal Crossing.

https://twitter.com/LuigiBlood/status/1378736192875810818

pmarreck3• 4 years ago

OK, interesting find!

Shared404• 4 years ago

Honestly, I don't see an issue with this specifically.

Yes, I think the emulator _should_ be allowed on the store, but on Android it's pretty easy to manually install apps.

For a monetized app, I may take a different position, but for something like an emulator that's already on shaky ground as far as monetization goes, I don't see that much of an issue.

DCKing• 4 years ago

There's a lot of assumptions in the comments that Nintendo is behind this. If you don't know much about DraStic, that would be a likely explanation. However, in the specific case of DraStic, that is not the most likely explanation. The more likely is that DraStic is abandonware, and this is Google's very Google-y way of cleaning this up.

The thing to know about DraStic is that it's not an actively maintained app. It had two major developers - one of whom dissappeared a long time ago, to the extent that the remaining developer has not been able to contact the former. The remaining developer is the emulation backend developer, but is by own admission no expert on Android, and the emulation's GUI and system integration. As a result, nothing much has happened to this emulator for years. Although _some_ compatibility fixes with the Play Store have been released a few years ago, DraStic has not been updated to use e.g. Android's Scoped Storage requirements.

What I think we're witnessing here is Google's extremely rough way of cleaning up (what it considers to be) abandonware. It may not even be related to DraStic not using the right Android APIs - it may be as stupid as developer fees not being paid, or some more kafkaesque Google thing.

The entire situation around DraStic is a bit of a shame. DraStic is a very impressive piece of software from a previous age - achieving full speed Nintendo DS emulation on 2010 smartphone hardware. In contrast, other Nintendo DS emulators - most notably MelonDS and DesMuMe - barely achieve full speed on certain DS titles on modern smartphone hardware.

The remaining developer has been promising an open source release of DraStic's emulator code for a long time, but has never delivered. They cited technical milestones to achieve before open sourcing, which are difficult to make if you're burnt out on your software. The biggest shame there is that the open source release would likely propel it to become the most versatile Nintendo DS emulator out there [1], but I'm afraid it's doomed to be a closed source, abandoned and outdated Android app.

Finally, Nintendo has never gone after emulators. In the US, there is only legal precedent that emulators are legal [2]. Nintendo risks cementing the legality of emulation more by trying (and failing) to persecute emulators. Having an abandoned emulator in the Play Store removed while keeping gazillions of other Nintendo systems up there doesn't seem like the way to fight emulation.

[1]: MelonDS is a more accurate emulator and fully open source, but it is much more demanding than DraStic - requiring a PC or recent high end smartphone to run all DS games full speed. DraStic would be efficient enough to allow for enhancements like runahead input lag compensation that cannot as easily be achieved on MelonDS without very fast PC hardware. The remaining DraStic developer is also the developer of gpsp, a Game Boy Advance emulator that is fast enough to run most GBA titles on Sony's old 2004 PlayStation Portable - there's a real reputation of efficiency there.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_I....

spartanatreyu• 4 years ago

Based on my own interactions with Google, this seems the most likely.

We have a niche educational/medical app directed to children, to help them understand their treatment with kid-friendly characters talking to them on their level.

The app was taken down because some form had been added to the Google Developer console (the backend of google play) years after we had published and we hadn't answered it. We only found out because someone else in the company heard from a customer that they couldn't find the app online.

A cursory glance showed that the app wasn't listed any more.

After we logged in to Google Developer console, and explored through google's ever changing menus and product renames, we had found an alert to fill out a form. We only had to tick no to a handful of questions on the form and submit it.

The questions were things like: "Is your app a news app?", "Does your app feature sexual content?", etc... All things that google should have been able to figure out based on the rating stuff we had to fill out when the app was first published.

About 2 days later, the app was available again.

lewispollard• 4 years ago

I'm not sure I buy that; the Drastic UI is a bit odd on Android as it uses its own game-style renderer for UI rather than Android UI. But I frequently find apps that give you an actual warning when launching that the app is out of date (in terms of target platform and API level) and you should contact the developer to see if there's an update; and often the permissions API used pops up the "old style" permissions UI where you have to accept all, rather than granular permissions. Those apps haven't been taken down, to my knowledge, and I still come across apps that do this as recently as last week. Drastic doesn't have such a warning, and it uses the modern granular permissions API.

appleflaxen• 4 years ago

Can it be put into the FDroid store?

Drastic DS Emulator Pulled from Google Play Store

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