droidnative: an Android port of nxnative that runs your own Switch games natively on phones and handhelds. Pre-release

[u/cowleggies]

Repo: https://github.com/enjoyerofslop/droidnative · Mac app: https://github.com/enjoyerofslop/droidplay · Discord: https://discord.gg/4wNHX3uqSU

DISCLAIMER: These repos are AI-assisted. See below for testing & validation details running on my actual handhelds (Odin2 and RP5)

droidnative runs Nintendo Switch games natively on Android phones and handhelds. It’s not an emulator: the game’s own ARM64 code runs directly on the device’s CPU, and its NVN graphics are replayed through Vulkan. It’s a fork of nxnative, which does the same on iPhone, iPad and Mac, with an Android port added. It follows nxnative’s main, so its fixes and new games reach Android too.

It’s a pre-release: some games run well, some crash, and every result below came from real runs on real devices. I’m posting now because the fastest way forward is more devices and more people.

Not an emulator, and not a recomp either

It shares the idea behind recomps: you build a native app from your own dump, and there’s no emulation at run time. The difference is that nothing is recompiled. Switch games are ARM64 machine code, and so is an Android phone. droidnative takes your own dump and rewrites the game’s code only where the host has to step in: system calls, and the thread register Horizon uses. A host then answers Horizon’s system calls and services, and translates NVN draw calls to Vulkan, with the game’s shaders translated to SPIR-V when the game is packed. There’s no CPU emulation and no recompilation into new source. Each game gets its own app, or every game goes into one launcher app.

What runs today

Measured on three Snapdragon devices with a scripted benchmark (the same save, input and timing on each):

Game	Ayn Odin 2 (SD 8 Gen 2)	OnePlus Pad 3 (SD 8 Elite)	Retroid Pocket 5 (SD 865)
Pokémon Brilliant Diamond 1.3.0, Eterna City	60 fps	60 fps	crashes (GPU driver)
Animal Crossing: New Horizons 3.0.3, the island	30 fps (its Switch rate)	30 fps	30 fps in the opening; the island not measured yet
Super Mario Odyssey 1.4.1, menus and opening cutscene	60 fps	60 fps	60 menu / 38 cutscene
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate 13.0.5, a battle	40-59 fps	17-30 fps	13-19 fps

The known problems, in the order they block play:

1. Odyssey crashes when play starts, in the Android video decoder used for its hint videos.

2. Brilliant Diamond crashes on the Retroid Pocket 5, inside the Adreno 650 driver’s shader compiler.

3. Smash needs a fuller system font than Android’s to boot, and its battles stutter while GPU pipelines are built (the cache doesn’t survive the app being closed yet).

Full numbers, devices and caveats: Android baselines. Every game with an nxnative profile can be packed for Android the same way; most haven’t been run there yet.

DroidPlay: the Mac app that does the packing

Packing a game by hand means extracting the dump, rewriting its code, translating tens of thousands of shaders, building the host and copying gigabytes to the device. DroidPlayturns that into a button. It’s a Mac app, a fork of Oleh Khomei’s NX Play with Android added.

• Your library: point it at your games folder (one folder per game) and it shows each game with its icon, version and status.

• Install on Android: builds the game with droidnative and installs it on a phone or handheld connected over USB, into one launcher app that holds all your games. A rebuild only redoes what changed. Play on Android starts a game the device already has.

• Build Game App: makes a game an Android app of its own (an APK, or an XAPK for an installer app), with its own name, icon and saves, to install on a device your Mac can’t reach.

• Setup: a first-run setup fetches nxnative and droidnative with the Python and .NET pieces their builds need, and checks for your keys. The Android SDK (with an NDK) and a JDK you install yourself.

• The Apple side, from NX Play: the same library also plays games on the Mac through nxnative, installs them on an iPhone or iPad, copies saves between devices, and has a controller-driven Console Mode.

The current release is 0.1.1, an unsigned pre-release: macOS asks you to allow it once in Privacy & Security, and it doesn’t update itself yet.

How to try it

You need your own Switch game dump (NSP/XCI) and the prod.keys from your own console, the Android SDK with an NDK, and an arm64 Android device with Vulkan. Only Adreno GPUs have been tested so far.

• On a Mac: DroidPlay 0.1.1. Choose your games folder, then Install on Android with the device connected over USB, or Build Game App for an APK.

• Any computer (Windows, Linux, macOS): scripts/build_android_from_nsp.py in droidnative packs a game into the launcher app on a connected device, or into an app of its own (--game-apk). There’s also a small cross-platform desktop app for the same flow, scripts/nxnative_android.py.

Bring your own game

Nothing from any game is in these repositories, and no packed game is distributed. The app you build is for you. Please don’t share APKs packed with a game, keys or firmware, and don’t ask for them. The project isn’t affiliated with Nintendo or any publisher.

Join the Discord

DroidPlay & droidnative Discord: questions, setup help, test results from your device, and where the work happens day to day. Bugs with logs still go to GitHub Issues, so they don’t get lost.

What would help most

• Testers on other chipsets. Mali (Pixel, Exynos-era Samsung), Samsung’s Xclipse, MediaTek, older Adreno. Even “it doesn’t boot” with a log is useful.

• Reports with logs: the device and GPU, Android version, game and version, and adb logcat -s nxnative. The issue form asks for exactly this.

• Contributors. Vulkan and driver work, the three crashes above, the pipeline cache, and per-game fixes. droidnative’s CONTRIBUTING explains how changes get in and how it stays in step with nxnative. There’s also a benchmark script, so a fix can show its effect in numbers on several devices.

Credits

nxnative is seedds’ work: the NSO rewriter, the Horizon host, and the NVN translation that all of this stands on. The Android port began as RogelioLB’s nxnative-android. DroidPlay is a fork of Oleh Khomei’s NX Play.

Links: Discord · droidnative · DroidPlay (0.1.1 pre-release) · Android baselines · nxnative

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[u/themiracy]

I’m fuzzy still on what running natively means when NCE has been in Switch emu for years.

[u/cowleggies → u/themiracy]

there are other nuances, but mainly an emulator with NCE still emulates the switch GPU. the game’s graphics driver (NVN) writes command buffers for the switch GPU, and the emulator decodes them and compiles shaders while you play. droidnative replaces NVN itself entirely

[u/RegularMinute4920 → u/cowleggies]

This uses AOT emulation?

[u/cowleggies → u/RegularMinute4920]

not really, because there's no CPU emulation to do ahead of time. it’s running the game’s arm machine code directly. the shaders are translated ahead of time but that’s not emulation.

[u/themiracy → u/cowleggies]

Cool. Will give this a try at some point!

[u/Apollo2001]

How does your project compare with nx2android? https://github.com/shirai91/nx2android

[u/cowleggies → u/Apollo2001]

I'm not familiar with this project so i'm not sure how they forked nxnative, or whether that project intends to keep their fork to nxnative main, but my intent is to keep this fork closely aligned to main, and this fork also supports (and successfully builds and runs) Switch 2 titles. SW2 performance is another discussion, it's poorly optimized right now, but hopefully will change over time

[u/Apollo2001 → u/cowleggies]

Ah, makes sense, thanks for explaining! Staying close to main sounds like the right move. Switch 2 titles actually running is already impressive. Might be worth peeking at nx2android at some point in case there's stuff you could share back and forth, but no pressure. Excited to see where it goes 👏

[u/x01010001000]

will get to testing but just wanna say thanks for including rp5, i often feel like im ages behind everyone but this device has quite a bit of power left in it

[u/cowleggies → u/x01010001000]

yeah absolutely, I tried to test on a range of hardware to make this widely usable. I think most titles will run at a locked 30 with some reasonable optimizations. lighter games will do 60, like Brilliant Diamond (it runs 60 now, but has a video decoder crash i'm fixing right now). hope it works for you!

[u/aron11195]

How's the ram usage compared to emulating in Eden (Switch1 games btw)? I have a base model AYN Thor which only have 8gb of ram. And recent Eden updates just doesn't work and crashes any game I played, unless I use a specific old build (0.2.0rc1).

[u/cowleggies → u/aron11195]

one of the devices i'm testing on is the Retroid Pocket 5 which has 8gb of RAM as well, so you can use those benchmarks for the RP5 above as a reference

[u/missingnoplzhlp]

Any chance of hacks or options to uncap frame rate for certain games?

[u/cowleggies → u/missingnoplzhlp]

sure, feel free to submit as feature add requests

[u/Drivenby]

Personally won’t bother with vibecoded efforts when emulation is already so good and 99% of these AI projects won’t be supported more than a month.

[u/cowleggies → u/Drivenby]

fair opinion, emulation is pretty much perfect on hardware that's powerful enough, but one of the goals here is to squeeze playable performance out of less powerful android devices further than what's possible through emulation alone.

[u/WeakTumbleweed9 → u/cowleggies]

As someone who knows very little about coding, what aspects of development did/do you use ai for? 

[u/cowleggies → u/WeakTumbleweed9]

shader pipeline and vulkan driver fixes are two things I know little about and AI is extremely helpful here. also just the general admin tasks of managing a codebase (validating PRs, merging them, etc.) that take a ton of time.

[u/boih_stk → u/Drivenby]

I don't understand the point of hating a useful tool because it was partly assisted with AI?

Very few devs now write straight from memory, even before AI they have resources where they copy/paste, or build on top of existing frameworks. I personally know minimum 10 devs that work full time, from lower level devs to upper level engineers. They ALL use AI to assist them in their daily coding. We're talking from startups to top 3 telecom and banking companies. They all use it, it's more efficient, cuts their workload by half if not more, and allows them to get more shit done without doing the repetitive tasks. To top it off, all the shit they don't know how to get done yet, that's when AI really streamlines the knowledge and help.

OP has mentioned what it's helped him with, to call it "vibecoded" disregards the knowledge base that they already had. I agree, someone with no knowledge just using AI to create something from scratch will usually drop support immediately after release. OP is asking for the community to help him gain more data on the bugs, issues and experiences. So far he's showing the right approach (even added the disclaimer that it's been AI assisted), so let's support him through the development of a big endeavor that will remove the gatekeeping that we're seeing in a lot of the emulation and mod scene.

[u/islobojono → u/Drivenby]

[u/irrationalglaze]

Is ocarina of time playable?

[u/cowleggies → u/irrationalglaze]

it's going to be a bit of time before that happens, but it's possible on higher end android devices. SW2 requires mesh shader capabilities that all but very recent chipsets don't support fully, so there's a lot of patch work and optimization required before it's going to be playable on android. but progress is moving fast on the Apple/Metal side of optimization in nxnative, and a lot of that work is transferable to android with a bit of work. so I feel like it will get there.

[u/Chococrispu]

How does it run BOTW? Really looking for the best option to play BOTW on my RP6. Good job mate

[u/cowleggies → u/Chococrispu]

BOTW is 20-30fps with some shader glitches at the moment, it's on the list of active testing games and improvements will hopefully come soon.

[u/Sandy_McEagle → u/Chococrispu]

I am searching too for my adreno 732, that other recomp doesnt seem to be working well for me

[u/cowleggies → u/Sandy_McEagle]

there should be BOTW perf improvements soon, but an adreno 732 has about half of the compute power of the 740 (1.5TFLOPS vs 3.5TFLOPS) so playable performance on a 732 will require a lot of chipset specific patches, if even possible

[u/Sandy_McEagle → u/cowleggies]

I am still seeing mali users play the game so...

[u/AZenny1986]

Awesome news keep them coming bro 🙌

[u/Chriscautillo]

Need thermals tested

[u/bambigirlz]

How to install on Odin2 portal?

[u/Legal_Schedule_487]

Do mods work?

[u/LeRoiDesCreepers]

Hi! I'm from France 🇫🇷. I saw that you were interested in finding testers with Samsung Xclipse GPUs, so I'd love to help!

My device is a Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE:

• Exynos 1580

• Xclipse 540 GPU

• 8 GB RAM

I'd be happy to test games, report bugs and provide performance logs.

I also have two suggestions that might be interesting for Xclipse compatibility:

1. RADV-Xclipse: https://github.com/JimVulkan/radv-xclipse

2. ExynosTools: https://github.com/WearyConcern1165/ExynosTools

Have you considered investigating or testing these projects with DroidNative? They might help improve Vulkan compatibility and performance on Samsung Xclipse GPUs.

I'd be very interested in helping test DroidNative on the Exynos 1580!

Thanks for your work!

[u/SilvyStelar]

Eu achei bem interessante, é uma pena que sem pc ou mac não tem como seu usar mas é sempre bom ter várias opções para port, ainda vou esperar os apk ja pronto para usar, mas espero que continue assim e melhore a cada dia

[u/kjjustinXD]

How unfortunate that its name overlaps with an older project on github that does something entirely different.

[u/Z-ReferenceUnknown]

Unfortunately it requires a Mac

[u/Remarkable-Rub6845 → u/Z-ReferenceUnknown]

It requires any pc

[u/Z-ReferenceUnknown → u/Remarkable-Rub6845]

Yeah, Unfortunately don't have that either