seedds/nxnative

A project for people who already own Switch games and want to play them on an iPhone or iPad without streaming from a PC. It only makes sense on recent hardware, and only for the handful of titles the authors have actually tested.

The problem

You own a Switch game and want to play it on the phone in your pocket, without a PC in the loop and without a streaming client. The usual route means running an emulator on a computer, and the phone becomes a remote screen. nxnative changes that step: you feed it the game's NSP files and your prod.keys, and a script on a Mac builds an unsigned IPA you sideload. On the phone, the game's own code runs on the Apple chip with its graphics translated to Metal. The result is a standalone app, not a remote session.

What's different

The central claim is that this is not an emulator. The README describes an NSO rewriter, a Horizon HLE host and an NVN→Metal translation layer: the game's compiled code is repackaged and run against a reimplementation of the Switch system services, with its graphics API calls mapped onto Apple's GPU framework. That is a different engineering bet from full hardware emulation, and it explains both the appeal and the narrowness — per-title bring-up rather than a general compatibility layer.

The README is candid about that narrowness. It lists games tested on an iPhone and playable, and everything else falls into a best-effort path: the script writes a survey, guesses settings, and still tries to pack an IPA that "may not start." Some listed titles run at 60 fps where the Switch version runs at 30 with a particular update. Known gaps include no amiibo and no online features, plus specific visual and audio bugs in named games. That honesty is useful, but it also means the project's value is concentrated in its tested list, not in the promise of a general Switch runtime.

Who should try it

A good fit is someone with an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, or an M1-or-later iPad, a Mac with Xcode and Homebrew for the build step, their own game files and keys, and a game from the tested list that they specifically want on a phone. For them, the pipeline produces a real app they can launch and configure with frame rate, render scale, docked/handheld mode and touch layouts.

A poor fit is anyone on older hardware, anyone hoping to run an arbitrary Switch library, and anyone who wants online play or amiibo. The README's hardware floor is not advisory: the games' textures are BC-compressed, and older iPhones cannot read that format. People who would rather avoid the command line have a documented alternative: the NX2Apple community fork, a macOS app that runs the whole pipeline and packs game files into a sharded RomFS archive for a slimmer IPA.

Requirements and limitations

Setup is Mac-centric. You need a Mac with Xcode and Homebrew, plus xcodegen, zstd, spirv-cross, glslang and the .NET SDK installed via Homebrew before the script will build anything. After that, the IPA must be sideloaded to the device, and you are responsible for supplying your own game files and prod.keys — the repository contains no game content.

Ongoing limits matter as much as setup. Support is device-bound to A17 Pro/M1 and later, iOS/iPadOS 26 or later, and title-bound to the tested list and whatever settings guessing can produce for untested games. Feature gaps are explicit: no amiibo, no online, and named bugs such as silent sounds after app switching in Fire Emblem Engage, decal artifacts in Three Houses, and one-pixel point/line effects in the Galaxy titles. The development docs and per-game notes are the place to check before committing to a title.

HotRepo's take

HotRepo has only a single dated observation: #24 on the NEW-REPOSITORY board (not the overall or daily Trending board), all languages, with 3,258 total stars recorded on 2026-10-25. That is a snapshot, not a growth series, so persistence cannot be judged. The repository is 12 days old. Before spending time, check whether your specific game and device appear in the tested list and per-game notes.

Project source and documentation