Nintendo Switch emulator Eden vanishes from the Play Store after just two weeks

Maintaining a gaming emulator sounds like a rough job. Not only do you want to keep users happy, always endeavoring to improve compatibility and stomp out bugs, but you’ve got to avoid pissing off big companies who could seriously undermine your efforts, whether those are console manufacturers themselves or the people behind app stores. Earlier this month, we shared some big news for emulation on Android as we spotted the Eden Emulator landing in the Play Store. And now, just two weeks later, it’s already gone.

Eden is a fork of the very popular Yuzu Switch emulator, and back on September 12, we learned that it was available on the Play Store for any gaming fan to try out. That kind of visibility was either a bit of hubris, or just confidence from the Eden team that their open-source efforts would hold up against any scrutiny by Google — or, more likely, Nintendo. On September 13, we managed to confirm that this listing was an official effort from Eden’s devs, even though it represented an older build, and not the new v0.0.3 release that was still awaiting Play Store approval.

Today, however, that Play Store Eden link is dead. Eden’s download page still points users there, so we’re not quite sure exactly when access was removed — the only other data point we have at the moment is that the Internet Archive recorded the Play Store listing as live when indexed on September 16. We can also see that the Utopia LLC Play Store developer link is down.

So far, we have not been able to track down any official explanation for what transpired here. Did Google remove the listing? Did the Eden team itself feel pressure to take it down? We’ll update this post if and when we learn anything worth sharing.

For now, at least, you can still get your hands on Eden for Android by hitting up the project’s GitHub page, where you’ll find the latest v0.0.3 APK ready for sideloading.