Azahar 3DS emulator for Android gets per-game settings, major performance gains, and more

We’ve seen several Nintendo 3DS emulators on Android in recent years, but Azahar is your best bet in 2026. The emulator has already received major updates this year, but the team says it’s now released what might be the biggest update yet.

The development team has posted pre-release builds of Azahar v2127.0 on GitHub, and it says this is “arguably the single largest update we have ever published.”

All versions of the app now support the ROM Bundle format, which collects a game ROM, downloadable content, and other data in a single file. Every version also offers slightly reduced audio/frame/input latency. All platforms also include better texture handling, resulting in general performance improvements.

What’s new with Azahar for Android?

The Android version of Azahar also gains a few improvements. The most notable addition is support for per-game settings, following in the footsteps of plenty of other emulators. This means you can fine-tune settings for a specific game without affecting settings in your other titles.

Azahar on Android also gains support for the Android Dynamic Performance Framework (ADPF) APIs. The team says adopting this system-level feature results in a performance boost on “most” Android devices, with gains of up to 15% on devices with Mali GPUs. Furthermore, the app now allows custom GPU drivers for non-Snapdragon gadgets. Another welcome tweak is that closing a game that was initially launched from a home screen shortcut will now close the emulator too.

There’s also great news for iOS players. Apple doesn’t let emulators like Azahar easily access JIT (Just-In-Time) compilation, which leads to a massive drop in performance. However, the emulator now offers a faster interpreter for devices without JIT, resulting in “greatly” improved performance on iOS and tvOS devices. In fact, the team says you can now run the app on an iPhone XS.