Nintendo DS Emulator DraStic Pulled From Google Play Store

A popular Nintendo DS emulator for Android Devices has disappeared from the Google Play Store, as spotted by the publication RetroHandhelds.

DraStic is an emulator developed by Exophase and has been available on the Google Play Store for over a decade. Recently, though, it appears that it has been pulled from the storefront with very little warning, with attempts to reach it now simply returning a white screen with the message "We're sorry, the requested URL was not found on this server".

As RetroHandhelds states, no public statement was released by the developer ahead of time to prepare people for its removal, which has inevitably led some online to speculate that Nintendo could be behind its rather abrupt disappearance.

In the past, Nintendo has famously been rather bullish when it comes to the topic of emulation. Previously, for instance, it was responsible for pressuring the developers of the Nintendo Switch emulator Ryujinx to pull its source code from GitHub and notably filed a lawsuit against Tropic Haze, the creators of Yuzu, and the 3DS emulator Citra back in February 2024 — a case that ended up with the latter company having to pay a $2.4m settlement and discontinue both projects.

As a result, it isn't out of the question, then, to suspect that Nintendo may have decided to go after another popular emulator of one of its consoles, but it appears that this might not actually be the case. This is because Exophase previously stated last year on Discord, following the Yuzu and Citra fallout, that they were considering removing the app from the store and making the project available open-source instead.

This announcement came at a time when Exophase had changed the app from a paid piece of software, costing $4.99, to a free product.

Still, it's bizarre that there doesn't seem to have been much of a heads-up before the emulator was actually pulled from the store.