Dolphin Emulator Android update adds cross-platform netplay and improved rumble amid "AI attacks"

It's a big month for Android users of Dolphin Emulator, with the latest Progress Report for the emulator being almost exclusively dedicated to new Android changes that have been rolled out to recent builds. The biggest change by far is the opening up of Netplay into a fully cross-platform experience—previously, Dolphin Netplay required that both players be on the same operating system. 

While workaround solutions like Steam Remote Play or Parsec still exist, overhauling Dolphin's built-in Netplay is a huge boon for the existing community of Dolphin Netplay enthusiasts. Classic and underlooked games like Sonic Adventure 2, Mario Party 7, Mario Strikers, Kirby Air Ride, F-Zero GX, TimeSplitters 2, Star Fox Assault, and WarioWare, Inc: Mega Party Games are sure to be a hit with this update. I'd also say Super Smash Bros. Melee, but there's already Slippi for that.

Besides Netplay, other improvements shipped to Dolphin for Android include improved rumble support, Dolphin settings being added to Android's settings search, and even improved Balance Support via the MayFlash DolphinBar. The improved rumble is especially a big deal, because not only has compatibility improved, but now touch feedback and vibration can be disabled separately.

Outside of the Android-specific changes, the Dolphin Progress report for September (aka release 2609) also added an option to display XFB framebuffer resolution in Dolphin's OSD. This can be informative, since the Nintendo GameCube and Wii both used non-square pixels. 

There's also been a purging of Visual Studio build files thanks to the use of CMake, which should reduce the need to manually update Visual Studio for Windows users.

The Dolphin Emulator development team has also seen an exponential increase in security issue reports for Dolphin, though the numbers won't immediately make that obvious. This year to date, the team has received "more than 10 reports," and that's more than in the past ten years combined. 

A single security issue in Dolphin used to take up its own Progress Reports, but now all an amateur bug hunter needs to crack open Dolphin is an AI agent. Most of the reported issues were thankfully simple buffer overflows, like the singular bug covered by the Dolphin Progress Report back in April of 2024.

To curb excess reports, Dolphin has opened up GitHub's existing vulnerability reporting flow to divert security bugs away from the standard bug tracker. Security fixes must be prioritized, unfortunately, but that's just the nature of software in 2026. On that note, there was also a scare concerning the possibility that a macOS cryptominer had made its way into the Mac build of Dolphin, but fortunately this turned out not to the case.

For the full details on the Dolphin team's recent exploits and improvements to the emulator, be sure to check out the full Progress Report. If you're an Android Dolphin user, though, or just want to emulate your favorite GameCube/Wii games with friends—get playing! It's cross-platform now, so you have no excuse.