Well, that didn’t last long: Floppy Cloud, the NES and SNES emulator for iOS we wrote about yesterday, has been pulled from the App Store.
As you might remember, Floppy Cloud purported itself to be an innocuous Dropbox or FTP server client that allows you to view or download files on your iPhone. But as Touch Arcade discovered, Floppy Cloud had a secret: it allowed you to load up NES and SNES apps and play them in a virtual emulator.
Floppy Cloud was available for about 24 hours before Apple pulled it. That falls in line with what we predicted Floppy Cloud’s likely App Store lifetime would be, although it appears Floppy Cloud did not manage to stay longer on the App Store because of the Christmas shut-down period.
Miss out on Floppy Cloud? Generally speaking, other apps masquerading as emulators make their way into the App Store every few months. But if you can’t wait that long, why not consider jailbreaking your device? Multiple emulators for prtty much every vintage console under the sun are available on the Cydia store.
In the meantime? RIP Floppy Cloud. It was nice while it lasted.
Source: App Advice
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
7 responses to “RIP Floppy Cloud: Apple pulls Nintendo emulator from App Store”
You know the more people know about something the easier it is for “the man” to find out. When gold like this comes out, making it an article will get it pulled faster than people can read it.
I had read this app has been available on the AppStore since sometime in October…
(Only recently the media discovered the emulator within perhaps?)
You can make whatever apps you want as long as the guy working for apple thinks it’s ok. They should just put a big black box over everything they don’t like.
I bought it yesterday. How do I ensure that I can use it in the future if I have to restore my phone or something? Do I need to sync with iTunes (which I haven’t done since the invention of iCloud).
Yes. Syncing to iTunes will make sure you have a copy of the .ipa for the app on your computer. Then you’ll be able to restore it whenever you want.
I downloaded it while it was up but have no idea how to get it to work. Anybody has step by step instructions?
There are still 2 great emulators available in the App Store. One is an nes emulator and the other Mame. waytoomanyapps just did a show on them:)