Lichii for Android

An Android port of the Lichii Nintendo Switch / Switch 2 emulator, maintained by pavelgajdo. It focuses on getting Switch 2 games running on Android phones, starting with Samsung's Exynos phones and their AMD-based Xclipse GPUs.

This is an independent, experimental fork. It is not affiliated with Nintendo or with the upstream projects it builds on.

Download

• Releases: github.com/pavelgajdo/Lichii-Android/releases. Download the .apk from the latest android-* release and install it on your phone. You may need to allow installs from your browser or file manager.
• Test builds: the android-latest pre-release is rebuilt automatically from every change on nx2. It has the newest fixes and the newest bugs.

Requirements: an arm64 phone with Android 13 or newer and Vulkan 1.3. Games, keys and firmware are not included. Only use games and system files you have legally obtained.

Tested on

Phone	Samsung Galaxy S26 (SM-S942B)
SoC	Exynos 2600
GPU	Samsung Xclipse 960 (AMD RDNA3, GFX11)
RAM	12 GB
OS	Android 17 (One UI)
GPU driver	Custom Mesa RADV build for Xclipse ("RADV Xclipse", Mesa 27.0-devel), installed through the app's GPU driver manager

Samsung's own driver on the S26 is also RADV-based and works, but on this phone it measured about 1.8× slower on the same scene than the custom RADV build.

Other phones may work, but this is the only device the fork is tested on so far.

📺 Game Testing & Video Footage: Check out gameplay performance tests and video showcases on the Exynos Gaming YouTube Channel.

Game status

Game	Status
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Switch 2)	Playable. Use 0.5x resolution; 16 GB of RAM recommended.

Only results tested on the phone above are listed here.

What's different from upstream

• AV1 movies are decoded with Android's hardware decoder (MediaCodec).
• Ocarina of Time's movies skip the game's movie-enhancement neural network (which needs NVIDIA tensor cores), and show the movie frame directly.
• Emulated tensor-core math (HMMA) is about twice as fast on RADV.
• EDEN_* diagnostic switches can be set on Android with an env.txt file (see below).

Recommended settings

• System: Handheld mode.
• CPU: NCE backend.
• Graphics: 1× resolution. Install a custom RADV driver if your phone has an Xclipse GPU.

Reporting problems

Open an issue with:

• your phone model, Android version and GPU driver;
• the game and what happened (screenshots help);
• the log from the affected session: Android/data/dev.lichii.android/files/log/eden_log.txt (dev.lichii.android.relWithDebInfo for test builds).

Check logs for personal information before uploading. Never upload games, keys, firmware or account data.

Diagnostic switches

Android can't pass environment variables to an app, so Lichii reads them from Android/data/<app id>/files/env.txt, one KEY=VALUE per line (# starts a comment). They take effect the next time the app starts. The available switches are listed in AGENTS.md. Leave the file empty for normal play: most switches slow the emulator down.

Building

cd src/android
./gradlew assembleMainlineRelWithDebInfo

You need the Android SDK, NDK 28.2 and CMake 3.22. The APK is written to src/android/app/build/outputs/apk/mainline/relWithDebInfo/. CI builds every push (see .github/workflows/android.yml). Pushing a tag named android-<version> publishes a release with the APK.

More documentation, inherited from upstream: build guide, coding guidelines.

Credits and license

Lichii for Android builds on Lichii by Zortos and on Eglantine, Eden, yuzu and Sudachi, and their contributors, including Eglantine's original developer Camille LaVey. Lichii artwork by YOB (yobslab). Original copyright notices and third-party licenses are retained.

See LICENSE.txt and the source files for the applicable license terms.