Google acquires team behind LeapDroid Android emulator for PC

The team behind LeapDroid, an Android emulator made for the PC that was first released publicly in June, have announced that they are joining Google. The announcement also comes with some bad news as the emulator will no longer continue to be developed.

In their announcement, Huan Ren and Huihong Luo, the co-founders of LeapDroid, stated:

While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new colleagues at Google to continue pushing the frontier of technology.

The team emphasizes that LeapDroid itself is not affiliated with Google, so this is not a flat-out acquisition of the company behind the emulator. It sounds like Google was more interested in hiring the team behind the software. If you already have LeapDroid installed on your PC, you can still continue to run it, but there will be no further updates and the official downloads for the emulator have been taken offline. We reviewed LeapDroid in July and found it to be a very solid emulator with only a few issues and hiccups.

What do you think of Google’s latest business move, and what do you think it means for the future of Android development as a whole?