GoKawiilAndy Walker / Android Authority
TL;DR The Azahar app has just received a major update on Android.
The 3DS emulator now supports multiplayer functionality, including public and private rooms.
This update also offers a combo button shortcut, improvements for dual-screen devices, and improved emulation accuracy.
Azahar is the best way to play Nintendo 3DS games on Android, serving as a spiritual successor of sorts to the Citra app. There’s been no shortage of updates in 2026, and the app has now gained a massive new feature.
The Azahar team has published version 2126.0 of the emulator as a release preview on GitHub (h/t: azaharemu on X). The biggest addition is multiplayer support on the Android version of the app. More specifically, this Android update brings the desktop app’s multiplayer functionality.
You should also expect some robust multiplayer options like public room browsing and creation, private room creation and joining, and chat capabilities. This feature doesn’t enable local communication between two Android devices in close proximity, though. Instead, the team explains that these nearby devices need to be connected to the same Wi-Fi network to play together.
What else to expect from Azahar’s new update? The Azahar release also brings a few other notable changes to the Android app. For one, the Vulkan graphics renderer is now “forcefully” enabled on devices using ANGLE for OpenGL rendering, reducing graphical defects. ANGLE translates OpenGL calls to Vulkan commands. The team cautions that most devices aren’t affected by this change, but notes that this will become important in the near future as upcoming Android 17 devices will switch to Vulkan-based rendering for most apps. This change is also theoretically handy on devices with Samsung Exynos and MediaTek chipsets, as these processors tend to offer more robust Vulkan support than OpenGL.
Other notable changes in this release include a combo button shortcut to easily press multiple keys at once, loads of improvements for dual-screen devices, tweaks to make frame generation software work properly, and GPU-related changes to improve accuracy.
This latest update joins several more released this year. The first update of the year delivered reduced input latency and ROM compression/decompression, while another major release brought shader caching.
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