When Kongregate released its Arcade App on the Android Marketplace, Google removed it in less than 24 hours. This surprised many people, and perhaps Kongregate more than anyone else.

“We were very surprised, especially since we had shown it to several people at Google in mobile, said Kongregate CEO Jim Greer. “The reason for the removal, and we didn’t find out until after it was already gone, was that they claim you can’t use their app store to distribute another app store — which is a reasonable restriction. But to us, what’s really bizarre, to call [Kongregate Arcade] an ‘app store’ seems like a pretty extreme stretch.”

The Kongregate Arcade App is a portal to Kongregate’s Flash site with over 300 titles. The difference is that for the app, it allows players to play games both online and off.

“If you download them,” Greer explained, “it’s essentially caching the file, and then when you play the game it actually uses a browser. It’s a browser — you can’t see the address bar but it’s a regular Android browser using WebKit. And WebKit loads the Flash file from the cache and you play the game in the browser, then you head back and you can play another game. So, it’s all essentially cached content delivered in a browser, which to me is just bizarre that that would be considered an ‘app store.’ It’s just browser-based content.”

“Every other removal that Google’s done previously has been, you know, fraudelent banking apps and other stuff that was just clearly over the line,” Greer said. “We were just shocked. I’m not ready to say it’s a philosophical shift from Google; you could misinterpret our app and think those are all native experiences, but right now I’m just confused.”

When asked why Google removed it, Greer said, “I just think they’re misinterpreting this. I think the people making this decision weren’t necessarily engineers. My background is as an engineer, so I’m hoping we can sort of have an engineer to engineer discussion where we say, ‘Hey, we’re playing content in the browser. This is crazy. We’re not distributing apps.'”

“Our understanding is that this wasn’t even a gray area; that it was totally fine. And that’s why we’re so surprised, he concluded.

Source: Joystiq