Bloodborne Is Now Booting On An Android Phone, And It’s A Big Deal

Indie developer edeegg just dropped an unofficial shadPS4 port that runs natively on Android. Brazilian YouTuber TRC GAMES posted footage that tells the whole story. Bloodborne and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice boot up on a smartphone and hit their main menus. Both games show off title screens, character creation, and loading screens. But the emulator freezes or crashes before any 3D gameplay rendering happens. The Android interface itself is already in solid shape. It handles game folders, PKG files, CPU/GPU overlays, and frame generation.

The technical feat is no joke. Getting PS4 binaries to run on ARM64 hardware takes countless hours of reverse-engineering work. The ARM64 push comes from a collaborative effort by open-source contributors who know mobile architecture inside out. shadPS4 already runs 111 games on Windows and 144 on Linux. The PC project also just picked up Big Picture mode and local multiplayer in its latest release.

The hardware demands behind the Android port lock out most everyday phones. A Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip and 8 GB of RAM make up the minimum recommended spec. A JIT compiler, Vulkan 1.3 support, and Turnip drivers round out the must-haves. One user took the experiment to a phone packing a MediaTek Helio G99 chip and just 4 GB of RAM. That setup falls well short of the official requirements. The emulator did not crash on boot and even pushed out audio without any video, since no compatible driver exists for the Mali GPU.

The gap between loaded menus and stable 30 FPS gameplay is huge. The distance gets measured in months, maybe years, of extra development work. The lack of an official PC port of Bloodborne from Sony makes the project even more valuable. Emulation is the only realistic path to a game that has stayed locked to a dead console. Android players actually playing Bloodborne on a phone still feels like a far-off dream. But these first builds show the dream is finally on the table.