Android is no stranger to emulators, and there are more of them on the Play Store than you can shake a stick at. It's a great platform for it, too, considering how powerful some phones are these days and how flexible Android is with other peripherals.
So of course it's a no-brainer that we're finally getting an emulator for the Nintendo 3DS on Android.
Citra emulator comes to Android
The Citra emulator has been around for quite some time, at least on the PC side. An Android version has been ported over before, but with quite a few performance problems and other quirks and issues. This build is the first official release from the Citra team that they're legitimately happy enough to launch on the Play Store.
There's a full blog post detailing the history of Citra on Android, including some of those unofficial ports and how the development pipeline has changed over the years to try and bring Android into its supported platform list, but keep in mind these are still relatively new in the world of emulators. You're going to want some serious horsepower to run games well.
The Citra team recommends at least a Snapdragon 835 CPU, and Qualcomm processors are going to fare better than other chips from MediaTek or Huawei. Android 8.0 Oreo is the lowest software they recommend you run, and unsupported devices can obviously run into performance problems or other graphical issues. Emulation is a fickle thing, and more overhead is always preferred.
Let us know if you're planning on playing any 3DS games this weekend!
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