Kongregate Arcade back on Android Market

The potentially beautiful romance between Android and Kongregate Arcade – a tidy hub for hundreds of free Flash games – has been a rather tempestuous one to date.

When the free app appeared on the Android Market last week, many (including us) were hailing it as a potential game changer for Android as a gaming platform. Then, within hours, it was taken off by Google for not meeting its terms of service policy.

Now Kongregate Arcade has reappeared on the Android Market in slightly tweaked form. It remains to be seen if it’s enough to warrant a stay of execution from the big G.

The changes are pretty techy, but they involve making the Kongregate Arcade browser's web address (for ‘tis a web-based service) visible upon start-up. This is “a standard feature of Flash," says Kongregate’s Jim Greer.

The second change is that the app now uses the browser’s cache to manage its offline files, rather than dumping them onto your phone’s SD card.

The purpose of all this is to make the Kongregate Arcade app more obviously not a rival app store, which is one of the things Google won’t tolerate. By exposing the app’s web browser workings, Kongregate evidently hopes that the differences between it and the Android Market will be obvious to anyone who cares (especially Google).

Greer told Joystiq that he hopes his app will now "meet Google's requirement that we're not creating a competing App Store while still creating a great gaming experience."

Of course, even if Google does reject the app again, you can still get it from GetJar and the Kongregate website.