Up until recently, the best Nintendo Switch emulator on Android was probably Skyline Emulator. It had been making promising progress and was capable of playing a lot of indie and popular titles alike, and solidified itself as one of the best emulators on Android. However, the team behind it has since stopped working on it due to recently increased threats by Nintendo. Now, though, the developers behind Yuzu have announced that their Nintendo Switch emulator can now officially run on Android.

To be clear, this is an early access release, and it's not guaranteed to work on your device whatsoever. Nevertheless, Yuzu is currently the go-to emulator on PC for people who just want to set up and play their favorite Switch games on more powerful hardware, and it's great to see it finally come to Android. If you want to get started playing around with it, the Yuzu developers say that you'll need a Snapdragon 865 device or newer (Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 minimum preferred) along with 8GB of RAM.

As for other chipsets that aren't Qualcomm, MediaTek and Exynos devices are not expected to work, aside from maybe the Exynos 2200. You'll also need, Android 11 at minimum and GPU drivers that support certain Vulkan extensions, though the Google Play Store should tell you and not let you install the app if your phone doesn't meet those criteria.

As for performance, the team shared performance data from testing their own games. A lot of games are playable out of the box from the looks of things, with titles like Super Mario 3D World + Bowsers' Fury being completely playable on a Samsung Galaxy S23. I tested Animal Crossing New Horizons and faced immediate graphical glitches, though.

When it comes to getting the best performance possible out of your smartphone, if you have a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 device, then the developers actually suggest installing Turnip GPU drivers, which the Yuzu app officially supports. It's all about finding what fits your smartphone, and the Yuzu Discord is also a great place to check out to see what works for other users, too. There are updated drivers you can get for Adreno 700 devices that seem to improve performance, for example.

To get started with Yuzu, you'll need to dump your own games along with your decryption keys from your own Switch. You can download the app from the Google Play Store, and it will guide you through the entire process of selecting the various components that you need, including your games folder and your keys. There are two versions of Yuzu: regular Yuzu and Yuzu Early Access, where Early Access requires a single payment to get early updates with new features that are being tested.

Let us know in the comments what you end up playing and on what device!