On Android, there are a few emulators that pretty much everyone knows for major systems. For the Nintendo Wii and Gamecube, it's Dolphin Emulator; for the PlayStation 2, it's AetherSX2; and for the Nintendo Switch, it's Skyline Emulator. While the emulator had been progressing phenomenally well, it has officially ceased development following DMCA action from Nintendo against an adjacent project.

Emulating Nintendo Switch games requires two key components: the game itself and keys dumped from your console that can decrypt the game. Lockpick is a commonly used tool to dump keys from your own console that you own, but Nintendo sent a DMCA request to GitHub requesting the project be taken down. The company claimed that Lockpick "bypasses the Console TPMs to permit unauthorized access to, extraction of, and decryption of all the cryptographic keys, including product keys, contained in the Nintendo Switch."

Because of the implications of this takedown request, the Skyline developers immediately ceased development. In a statement posted in the team's Discord server on the 6th of May 2023, developer Mark said that "the risks associated with a potential legal case are too high for us to ignore, and we cannot continue knowing that we may be in violation of copyright law." The team had fully believed that dumping keys from your own console was completely legal prior to the takedown notice.

All of Skyline Emulator is open source and will soon include the incomplete source code for the 'texman' and 'nnvk' branches. 'texman' was a branch that was supposed to help improve texture management and graphical glitches, whereas 'nnvk' was a translation layer for translating NVN (Nintendo's Switch graphics API) to Vulkan.

The only saving grace of this decision is that because of the open-source nature of Skyline, it's possible that another developer may come along to continue the work that was being done. Nevertheless, it likely won't continue under the Skyline name and may be a while until we see it, if we ever do. The team behind the Yuzu emulator has not responded to Nintendo's DMCA of Lockpick or the shutdown of Skyline Emulator, but the team behind the Ryujinx emulator announced on their Discord server that "Ryujinx is not shutting down."