Things have been rough as of late. Please read this one through as it will also shine a little light on why products and updates have not been rolling out. I’ve been extremely busy getting things straight in the “real world”. Though Google’s takedown of my Market and Checkout account couldn’t have come at a worse time. As you may have seen, Yong Zhang (yongzh) of Android emulator fame, was also taken down from Market by Google in the same manner that I was.

First and foremost, our takedowns have nothing to do with any sort of open source licensing violation. Both Yong and I handle developer relations behind the scenes. We give cuts to original authors at times, and I have posted sources to my source repository. Though there is a lot of rhetoric surrounding this, it is not an issue.

Google has no developer relations and support. Instead of Google simply removing the application in question, psx4droid, they did that and followed up a week later suspending my entire Market and Checkout account, with no interaction on my part.

And what happens when you suspend a Market account with a case such as Yong’s with lots of customers? Well you get hellish levels of emails, tweets, etc. that I must respond to most of every day. What’s worse is these customers are pretty stranded by Google. We can’t verify that many customers by hand. There’s no way to honor these previous customers, effectively killing our products. We can’t even issue a refund to users who are furious.

Yong’s emulators built Market up and gave it purpose when there was little to care about on there. Google was well aware of Yong’s top selling apps. Why is Google killing off developers (not even apps but the developer accounts!) that helped them get to where they’re at now? I wonder if they were aware all along. Take high risk apps, make themselves look all nice and open, then once they approach AppStore reach, they pull the developers they used. World may never know.

Right now as it stands, there’s little to no chance of Yong or I getting back on Market without a fight. I appealed and lost with Google in a canned response manner. I can go to 3rd party storefronts, but they have such a small number of users compared to Market, it’s not really an option with the large amount of effort these apps take.

For Cydia fans out there, I apologize for my lack of updates. But with all that has been happening, it made updating so many products nearly impossible. Things have snowballed and I now have so much work to do on Cydia products that it too has become more work than it’s worth.

So I wonder where that leaves me. This has killed my spirits immensely and I think it’s time to change things up.

It’s been so long since we last spoke! I’ve been up to all sorts. There has been a lot going on in my personal life. Being so stressed out from constant work for the past two years on all things ZodTTD, I started to get back to that outside world. Lots of socializing time later, I am now back to work again. Ah shucks, who am I kidding when I call this work. It’s pretty friggin’ fun!

As you may have noticed, I have streamlined this website very much. The goal being a way I can quickly deliver news to you about what I’m working on. Twitter only extends so far at the moment. I really need a place I feel safe to express what’s going on in the world of ZodTTD. There was a time I dreaded posting, as comments flooded in so fast and sometimes so nasty that I couldn’t handle cleaning it up. I now have two solutions to this issue, I have a moderator available to lay down the law if needed… or I can disable commenting if it gets to be uncontrollable. I will keep this place nice and clean from now on.

As my birthday is on April 2nd of the year 1982, I am considering reopening this site and getting lots of good work done a present to myself. So what am I up to?

As of very recently I was working on a large update to psx4droid. This update is MUCH faster and adds the options for OpenGL ES support which can increase performance of devices with good GPUs. Issue is Google pulled this release upon Sony’s request. I am porting the changes back over to the iOS version and I think many Apple fans will be very happy with it!

gpSPhone, the Gameboy Advance emulator for iOS will be receiving a much needed update as well. In addition to PSX, this emulator will receive iControlPad (get yours now) support in it’s next update. And best yet, many previously broken ROMs such as Camelot titles will now work thanks to patches by Yongzh of Android fame.

Then I will focus on n64iphone, snes4iphone, gameboy4iphone, and genesis4iphone. Lots to do, and I doubt I’ll be able to rewrite the entire UI as I’d like to just yet.On top of all this I also have a nifty AppStore app coming out soon. It’ll make some Cydia fans happy to see it, as I took inspiration from the community in making it.

I really am grateful for those who stick by my side and inspire me to keep providing fun apps to play with. I’m still alive and kickin’ thanks to you! Feel free to message to me on Twitter @zodttd or contact me by email via this site’s Contact page.

Thanks,

ZodTTD