GameStop resubmits Kongregate Android app

A revised Kongregate app has been resubmitted to the Android Marketplace – days after it was banned for apparently breaking house rules.

Android owner Google had intentionally removed Kongregate’s app from the Android Market last week, an executive close to the matter said, just a few hours after its well-publicised release.

Kongregate CEO Jim Greer said “the reason for the removal, and we didn’t find out until after it was already gone, was that [Google] claimed you can’t use its app store to distribute another app store, which is a reasonable restriction”.

He claimed that describing the Kongregate Arcade app as another app store was “a pretty extreme stretch."

Kongregate Arcade is billed as a brand new app that offers hundreds of games for free.

The application is a portal to around 300 games built in Adobe Flash – something which many expected Google would be pleased with, as it gives Android an edge over the Flash-banning Apple.

Kongregate owner GameStop has submitted a revised version of app which now runs all its games within a browser, storing games in that browser’s cache rather than saving them as their own entities on the phone.

This may be a workaround that satisfies Google, though Kongregate won’t be assured it is in the clear until a few days after release.

The open-source nature of Android means that apps are not vetted before release, but after.