Why Eden vanished from the Play Store
In case you missed it, Eden was finally approved on the Google Play Store on September 12. It was the first (and only) Switch emulator to make the move since Yuzu in 2024.
The process took months, with my last interview with Eden’s lead developer Camille LaVey revealing that the team first started the process way back in July. That’s well before Google announced its crackdown on sideloading apps.
However, the app only lasted two weeks on the Play Store before it was removed. The team hasn’t publicly announced why it disappeared, leading the community to speculate that Eden had finally flown too close to the sun, and Nintendo was shutting down the whole project.
It turns out that’s only half right. Nintendo is indeed the cause of the removal, but Camille LaVey claims that it wasn’t a manual action, but rather “a Nintendo bot reporting Eden.” The app had received several DMCA notices from Nintendo since it was added to the Play Store, and the text of those notices does seem to lend credence to this statement.
And by text, I mean a complete lack of text. Lumen, which collects and archives requests to remove material from the web, lists 16 separate DMCA notices sent from Nintendo to Google in the month of September. Note that this includes not just the Play Store, but all Google services, including search.
12 of those are directed at the Eden Play Store listing.
The other four contain specific details about the copyright violation in question. For example, this one is directed at a few websites promoting or selling SX OS, which is “designed to bypass technological protection measures in the Nintendo Switch video game system” to play pirated games.
None of the Eden DMCA notices contains such text. Like the image below shows, they all have blank descriptions, with only the Play Store URL listed. They don't even list the URLs of the original copyrighted content.
The final notice above appears to be the one that caused the app to be removed. It was submitted on September 21, five days before the Play Store listing disappeared.
Apart from this, Camille LaVey states that the Eden team has not received any formal legal notices from Nintendo. The GitHub page remains active, with the latest builds available, and development work continues. In fact, the team just teased improved 8 Elite support in an upcoming build, which is great news for the KONKR Pocket FIT Elite and AYN Odin 3.
As for the Play Store listing, it may still return. LaVey writes:
“We’re going to appeal, because Nintendo likes to abuse [its] power and just [report] without justification. Google seems to [be] lazy and just obey … other corpo reports.”
He’s confident that the app will be returned to the Play Store, stating that Nintendo typically uses “nonsense arguments” in its reports. Although in this case, there's no argument listed at all.
In any case, appeals can take weeks to resolve, and there’s no guarantee Nintendo won’t continue to intimidate the Eden team and send more DMCA notices in the future. This worked last year with Ryujinx and various Switch emulator forks. Even the Yuzu case was settled out of court, with Nintendo getting everything it wanted (except a legal precedent).
However, it’s worth noting that, despite using the same codebase, Eden is a significantly different project from Yuzu at its peak. Yuzu developer Tropic Haze had numerous legal vulnerabilities for Nintendo to target, generating tens of thousands of dollars every month via Patreon while openly providing pirated games and copyrighted materials on Discord.
Does that mean Eden is safe from Nintendo’s legal ire in the long run? Only time will tell.
