News 2024-02-28: Amazon has decided to remove ES-DE from their Appstore because “The app facilitates emulating and pirating of games from third-party sources without explicit authorization from those sources.” Everyone that knows anything about emulation knows that this is not true, and especially not for a frontend that does not ship with any games or any emulators. We have attempted to appeal this decision but Amazon has refused to reinstate the store entry.

Therefore we have decided to self-publish the APK instead of relying on any app stores. As a first step you can join our Patreon to receive a download link to the APK. Note that this is NOT a subscription, you can turn off recurring payments at any time and you will still receive future APK updates. But if you do choose to support the project long term in these difficult times then it’s much appreciated. I have worked four years on ES-DE without making any money from it, and it’s almost like a second job now. Supporting us financially instead of pirating the app is a way to make sure development will continue and that ES-DE has a future long term.

Please spread the word of what has happened and if you did buy the app from the Amazon Appstore then ask them for a refund and don’t hesitate to criticize them for their decision. We have not yet received any money from amazon and due to them claiming that ES-DE is illegal we doubt that will change. Anyway, it seems like you can still install the app from the Amazon Appstore app if you have bought it, but there will obviously be no further updates published there.

I have attached a link to their Patreon with the post and bolded the section that states that a subscription isn’t required for updates. You will still need to stop reoccurring payments if you don’t want to further support the project.

Personally I’d rather see them migrate to a site like itch.io which already has a section for Android applications and a category for tools. It seems to work well for PICO-8 and would allow users to pay extra if they wanted to make a one time donation to ES-DE.

They could also keep the Patreon in addition to this so people can keep track of updates.

Either way they could incentives people with a preview build if they wanted to go in that direction.

I hope it stays DRM-free so it can easily be transferred along with your ROMs and installed on handhelds.

Edit: RetroGamesCorps update titled EmulationStation Update: Why We Can’t Have Nice Things was released. It has a walkthrough about requesting a refund for your purchase on the Amazon app store and installing the new APK. Russ also states the information posted above.