Emulation Station is now available on Android, allowing retro gamers to play their collections on more devices than ever before.
The news was revealed earlier today in the Emulation Station Discord by Leon Styhre, the developer behind Emulation Station.
Styhre wrote on Discord; “I’m very happy to announce that after months of hard work ES-DE is now available on Android! This is a paid (but cheap) app that you can buy from the Amazon Appstore”.
Emulation Station is currently only available via the Amazon Appstore with Styhre revealing that “Google has been unwilling to let me publish ES-DE on their store”. The developer hopes that the frontend will eventually see a release on the Google Play Store “some day”.
Emulation Station on Android will set you back $5.39 on the Amazon Appstore but it’s a small price to pay for such a beloved frontend for your retro games library. Players keen to download the app must be using Android 11 or later.
The frontend supports a huge list of emulators and can play games from over 120 different platforms. Emulation Station also offers an assortment of themes to use and players can download even more using the built-in theme downloader.
App Approval
Leon Styhre answered several direct questions from users within Discord and revealed how the app approval process differed between Amazon and Google.
“Amazon was like heaven”, Styhre shared, “it took around 30 minutes to register a developer account, setup the store page and submit the app. Within 24 hours or so everything was done and it was approved and released”.
Their experience with the bringing Emulation Station to Android via Google has been a bigger challenge however. “Google keeps rejecting and refusing to respond to emails or pickup tickets”.
Styhre concluded by saying “Google is a complete nightmare”, although Styhre does suggest that they will try to launch Emulation Station on the Google Play Store again in the future.
Emulation Station has previously been available to players using Linux, macOS and Windows and the new version for Android is the same application for those systems allowing gamers to easily migrate their ROMs, gamelist files, scraped media and custom collections.
The newly announced Android support for Emulation Station will be good news for retro gamers rocking an Android device such as the new ANBERNIC RG556 or Retroid Pocket 4.
I would also like to mention how much we here at Retro Dodo respect the work of the Emulation Station team, they’re doing great things in the space and I am happy that they are charging the community as they deserve every single penny of it.
