There's a new Xbox emulator on Android, but here's why you should run away from it
TL;DR The supposed first Xbox emulator on Android, Xanite, has launched in V0.1.
It is not able to emulate Xbox games, and it appears to be nothing more than an empty shell.
Updates are promised in the coming weeks, but don't get your hopes up.
Emulation on Android has come a long way in recent years, with systems up to and including the Nintendo Switch and PS3 now playable. However, despite coming out way back in 2001, the original Xbox still doesn't have a decent emulator on Android, despite its sixth-gen peers like the PS2 and GameCube having excellent support.
Last week, a new emulator called Xanite emerged to change all that. It was slated to be a completely new Xbox and Xbox 360 emulator on Android, unaffiliated with established PC emulators like Xemu and Xenia. There were several red flags from the beginning, starting with the fact that the two consoles have little in common aside from the name, so a single app emulating both would be a major undertaking.
Regardless, the official launch timer ticked down to zero yesterday, and after a few more hours of waiting, V0.1 of Xanite was available to download from GitHub. The first release focuses on Xbox emulation, with Xbox 360 coming at a later date. As an early release, it's designed mostly for testing, but it quickly became apparent that something was amiss.
Xanite appears to be an empty shell with no emulation code.
As of writing, I have not seen a single instance of someone getting Xanite to emulate an Xbox game. There is a screenshot of the Doom 3 title screen in the GitHub, but that's the only proof that it works at all. In fact, the apk is unsigned, so it isn't even possible to install on an Android device without further tweaking. Even then, the first version doesn't work on Android 14 or 15 devices, so you'll need an older device just to see the UI.
Although the full source code isn't available (which isn't uncommon for early releases), users began picking through the app and found even more troubling issues. It appears that the initial release does not contain any emulation code, and it's essentially a glorified UI in an empty shell. It also includes copyright protected assets, such as Xbox BIOS, which any established emulation developer knows is a major legal liability.
Jarrod Norwell, the developer behind the Folium app on iOS and the discontinued Nintendo Switch emulator Sudachi, described it as 'basically nothing code in an app that just has the Xbox dashboard embedded as an asset which is almost certainly highly illegal' in a post on Reddit. The official Xanite Discord is an unmoderated cesspool which I will not link to here, so don't expect any meaningful support.
While it's possible that the developers continue to make improvements, the unfortunate truth is that they don't appear to have much experience. You'll have much better luck running Xemu in Winlator, despite the obvious performance hit. Both Xemu and Xenia are open-source, so with any luck this whole debacle might inspire a different dev group to take up the task of porting to to Android.
Until then, don't waste your time with Xanite.
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