nx2android Turns Nintendo Switch Games You Already Own Into Native Android Apps, With No Emulator Running

Five days old and already past 300 stars on GitHub, nx2android does something emulators don’t bother with. Its README puts the whole trick in one line: “the game’s own arm64 code runs on the device, with the Switch’s system services stood in for by a host and NVN graphics replayed on Vulkan.”

That works because a Switch and most Android phones speak the same CPU language, so nothing has to pretend to be the console’s processor. What’s missing is everything around the code: Horizon, the Switch’s operating system, and NVN, Nintendo’s graphics API. nx2android supplies a stand-in for the first and translates the second into Vulkan, which Android phones already speak.

The workflow is three tabs deep. Unzip the Windows build, click Download missing tools (the Android NDK, the .NET SDK and Google’s platform-tools, “about 1 GB, from Google and Microsoft”), point it at your prod.keys, then pick a folder holding the game’s NSP, XCI, NSZ or XCZ files and click Port. Out comes an APK plus a data folder, which it can push to a phone plugged in over USB. “The first port takes a while (extraction, rewriting the game’s code, translating its shaders); later ones reuse what has not changed,” the README says.

The releases came fast. v0.1.0 landed October 27 and v0.1.3 on October 29, and the latest one added nine games at once, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Celeste, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker and Super Mario Bros. Wonder among them. The developer tests on one tablet, a Lenovo Legion Y700 with a Snapdragon 8 Elite. Most of the list runs at 60 frames per second there; Mario Wonder is listed at “60 fps with dips to 40,” and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is marked a work in progress.

The catch most phone owners will hit is the GPU. “The device’s GPU must read BC-compressed textures (Adreno, Xclipse; not Mali or PowerVR),” the README says. That rules out every phone whose graphics chip is a Mali or a PowerVR, however fast the rest of it is.

nx2android didn’t invent the approach. It is the Android port of nxnative, which seedds created on October 13 and which has passed 9,600 stars doing the same thing for iPhone, iPad and Mac. That README is just as blunt: “It is not an emulator: the game’s own code runs directly on the Apple chip, with Switch graphics rebuilt on Metal.” Al Landes at Gadget Review described the method as one that “rewrites the Switch game’s executable components so the original game code runs on Apple’s Arm-based processors directly.”

Then there’s the legal line, and the project draws it carefully. It ships no games and no keys, and “the tool never ships or downloads either.” The README tells players to “Dump both from your own Switch, and don’t share them or the APKs and data packs built from them.” On whether any of this is allowed, it doesn’t pretend to know: “Whether decrypting your own games for your own use is allowed depends on where you live.”

Both projects are under a month old, and they move a game off the console in a different way than anything Nintendo has sent notices about so far. An emulator is one program that runs any game. A port like this produces a new app per game, built on the player’s own PC from the player’s own files. That changes who holds the finished product. Whether the next wave of notices adapts to it, and whether GitHub keeps hosting a repository that names Super Mario Bros. Wonder in its release notes, is the thing to watch.