Android on Nintendo Switch is AMAZING.

- imagine if you will a Nintendo switch that not only can play Zelda and Smash Bros but can also run all your retro games with emulation run all of your Xbox PC PlayStation games with game streaming and even play Netflix let me try oh no I can't - awesome well that's fine because you don't have to imagine it we installed Android on our switch and it can do all those things look I'm playing Halo right now wow that's freaking awesome it is but hold on a second huh I mean is it worth your valuable time and possibly breaking your switch to do this wait a second this is my switch well I mean I think it's worth it right but this is my switch yeah yeah but it's definitely worth it okay just like our sponsor a ridge wallet is the sleek way to keep wallet bulge down thanks to its compact frame and RFID blocking inner plates check out their new patterns and use the offer code Lynas to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping [Music] this is my first time actually seeing this and this trips me out so hard like it shouldn't because a big part of the reason this is possible is that the switch has way more in common with an Android device like your phone than it does with other game consoles it's running an NVIDIA Tegra x1 processor with four arm CPU cores and custom Nvidia graphics it's got four gigs of RAM 720p touchscreen and a 43 10 milliamp hour battery so a group called switch route it's a great name is they set out to modify Android to run on the switch specifically lineage OS an open-source fork of Android long story short switch route totally worked and they published their results in july 2019 and people have been using android on the nintendo switch since then let's get to how this is possible now we'll have links in the description with detailed instructions on how to do all this and shout out to xda-developers and the switch root subreddit very helpful when I was figuring all this out in order to get into recovery mode what you need to do in order to boot Android on this thing need to hold down power volume up and the system's home button which is not the same as the switch home button right there the real home button can only be triggered by shorting two pins in the joy conrail which is down there but I can't show you which ones because Nintendo's legal team is out for blood these days and we've got kids to feed ltte store comm speaking yes please check it out the easiest way to do it is actually using something called an our CM jig so it's this little 3d printed doohickey you can get on Amazon for a few bucks so if six dollars for a little thing like this is too rich for your blood and you're willing to risk accidentally shorting the wrong pins you can also bend a paperclip this is fine craftsmanship okay really like this I did my best so you can achieve the same result with a paperclip but again our understanding is that Nintendo might get real butthurt if we show you exactly the shape of it to how to bend it so it's blurred but we do have links in the description one more thing we're gonna need this SD card that's installed in the back of our switch has already been flashed with switch routes Android Fork and if you're gonna try this it's really important to use the fastest SD card that you can find because otherwise system responsiveness and especially app launching speeds are going to be really slow so now what so we've actually already running Android on this right now so I should undo some will undo that okay one moment please so now I'm triggering the system real home not a real home by and then we just I have small hands it's hard to hold the hook okay so now I just press these two buttons yes boom hey look at that RCM okay alright so now we know that we're in the recovery mode okay so from here we're gonna inject a payload so now we are in the bootloader so now we can disconnect because they don't need this anymore okay and you got to do that every time yes however some people have developed these little USB C dongles that are preloaded with it and you can just plug it in and then injects it and then young plug it so that would be how you do the real portable solution phrase connected to the laptop we've booted in the recovery mode and now I know that's not the right button - you have to click more configs and then switch root android oh and now we're booting into Android now this is gonna take a little time because SD card yes and also it's all a little glitchy you know this is a I'm not a programmer but I understand that you know I'm we're not dealing with consumer software here ok can I put the jaikon back on now you can but it won't register it because the only way that this tablet now can connect because it's just an Android tablet now right the only way that this can connect to these controllers is via bluetooth so it doesn't take very long well yeah this is fine use hello yeah it is you know I want like you know low latency gaming ok so what do we got here we got some games we got some streaming apps we got stadia so I installed stadia but stadia doesn't actually work on this thing because it only works with pixels right now but but later later it will yeah okay look at this you got a dolphin later it's all there oh man it shouldn't surprise me but like oh wow like you know Wi-Fi is working and stuff I mean yeah there's only so many like Wi-Fi chipsets out there right yeah I guess okay my keyboard doesn't oh okay that it takes a second the other thing a second didn't it now when you were talking about the SD card speed I hadn't really thought about that much okay look just it warms up it warms up it needs it's like a like a cold car engine you know it kind of just needs a needs a second uh-huh I'm really like evangelizing this thing I mean it's cool and and you could tell that I was on the Netflix support page because the Netflix app doesn't actually work natively you need to kind of trick the system into thinking your your installations legit and I haven't done that yet so Netflix actually I know I said Netflix works in the intro but it doesn't actually work right now but it can work I just haven't done the stuff to make it work wow this is slow this is shockingly sweet what I'm trying to go to our forum I'm on Chrome but it's just like Chrome is bad why do you hate Chrome what are you an opera opera GX fanboy now gaming browser that video really converted me yeah no no I'm saying Chrome is not so good on the switch right now okay wow look at that it's amazing how slow it is so part of the reason you might be kind of getting glitchyness yes because the touchscreen is also like really really finicky right it's it's sometimes it does double taps and got it so you gotta got to be very I'm not having much trouble with it just got a belief you're not believing hard enough slide that baby on okay but like the actual joique on connector here is now serving no purpose whatsoever it's charging so these these these these can't just some people were worried about that so it is charging okay yeah it's not a wired it's not a physical connection okay there it goes allow access to your contacts and call history it's what the hell well you you don't want to give the journal hi yeah Riley I just wanted to talk about the privacy concerns I have about your joy Khan don't worry about don't worry about it's fine satisfied we've looked at everything we double-check the code okay it is good to go perfect thanks all right bye ya later love you I'll see you soon Oh God oh okay sail down show them lo debar what do you want to play let's play some nests they load content downloads right so which one is ass nest game linked the pass to the Super Mario World we're gonna take that out of the video because that's yeah a super easily get a cover it's rabbit okay so we're gonna use these controls yes which we could rebind we could pretty sweet yeah look at this wait no it's not exactly oh man what it's not what oh it's not mapped yeah that's that should be a I think this is run X you know what it like is fine in terms of responsiveness yeah yeah looks really good I mean I guess that makes sense like it's not like 720p isn't you know plenty for a game that's this old last I checked the system might be rendering everything at 1080p instead of 720p which means that we could potentially get even more performance this is this is fine right yeah that's what I'm saying okay let's run something a little more a little more more different as they say downloads there's tactics and we should stress that you should only emulate games you physically own cuz this was n64 era right PlayStation PlayStation 1 yeah how do you mean n64 era it's the PlayStation era what are you some kind of Nintendo fans yes that's how I know I only had an n64 I didn't have any Playstations all my Playstations were n64 's that was the station I played at I had my workstation and my playstation ok here we go alright we're in the game this is actually running quite well look look at that I work so I can Pan the cameras in the camera I didn't know you can do that this is impressive because even though the Tegra x1 absolutely is more powerful than the original playstation right emulating it has a ton of overhead see the fact that this is running so smoothly is like just super cool to me that's that's a testing to the switches power and it's also a testing to retroarch which has like a million different emulators you can use oh boy we off to a good start boys okay it says women winwaker up but you can't go under water just like breath of the wild unfortunately huh okay so this game is actually a good example of what we're gonna run into which is that the joy Kahn's I'm pretty sure in this game they're not analog like try to walk slow yeah I see that the joystick acts as like an eight-way d-pad the switch when you don't run Android on it normally has two performance settings for the GPU one runs at 384 megahertz in Portal mode and then in docked mode it runs in seven sixty eight megahertz but switch routes build of Android gives you three profiles to pick from in the battery settings balanced quick and the one we're using performance which runs the GPU at nine hundred and twenty megahertz so then even then as you are seeing even the general Android UI that there's some chug there and games even more demanding games there's a bit of chug as well but it is emulated and it's doing a pretty good job this is playable yeah you know by like you know console gaming states you know we haven't got winwaker for switch yet we do Nintendo does a great job of reira leasing all these things but like something they don't except when they don't hey there it is oof okay now it's going it's running fine it's a little squishy it's not the best it's not the best and it looks really soft like it seems like we're actually rendering at a non-native resolution and it's really affecting us on this one right yeah so this is where that whole 720p versus 1080p thing comes into account let's do some streaming so we got steam link moonlight you can use those for PC streaming you got your X cloud because we're in the X cloud preview you got GeForce now so you got a number of options for that roof a is a is the jump a this jump okay oh no I think the first time I got PC game streaming running on the switch I was kind of like it's like a Eureka moment because you're like wait I have a switch I've used it for Portable Nintendo gaming up until now and now it's like wait this is opening the door here I can play all my cool PC games that I want to play on my switch Xbox logo on a switch I've wanted to see that my whole life get them well you put me right in the middle but you're not inverted do you have no excuse not to kill everybody now oh yeah I mean I'm not even dead okay but how cool is this it's halo on a switch that is pretty cool okay so as you're noticing probably no analog input and go the joysticks now they are working on a fix to an enable analog input with the joy cons yeah that would be better and apparently in the next release of switch route the next release of switcher is gonna be Android 9pi because this is actually Android Oreo 8.1 what's the other really cool thing about the Nintendo switch that you can do you promised Netflix I already talked about that let's see what's not a really cool thing you can do with a switch you can talk to a TV you can dock it let's go let's try that alright come on ah look at that display cloning and look at this because the controllers are bluetooth they still work right and there's a WoW or seeing some lag dude now we have two Xbox controllers connected to the switch we're gonna plug it in we're gonna cross our fingers like hey okay so now let's go home let's go to stop what are you doing stop stop it what halo five do it okay so I have no idea whether it's gonna work and there's probably gonna be some lag I think it's fair to say there will be some leg but I wanted to do it just to say that we played halo 5 multiplayer on a switch on a switch so we're gonna have leg from the Bluetooth controllers yes we're gonna have leg from the weirdness of or dock solution here we're gonna have leg from using game streaming from a remote server hey we're all we're gonna have some leg from Wi-Fi yeah wait how do you know when this is done what kind of a progress bar is this as meaningful a progress bar as Microsoft ever gives you so Android is reading both of our controllers as one controller oh yeah so here goes teamwork you move I aim okay that was to shoot okay I'm walking yes indeed are you gonna aim at all or like we're not gonna look where we're walking all right I think it only accepts input from one at a time oh I see how interesting all right we beat the game yeah yes that is really cool I mean especially because we're not making any permanent changes to the system like it's basically impossible for Nintendo to remotely brick your console because of what you're doing here which is awesome but before you guys run out and try it we were only able to do this because pretty soon after the switches launch the homebrew community found this exploit in the switches recovery mode called fuse a gelée which can be used to inject a bootloader but unfortunately shortly after that Papa Nintendo found out what the kids were doing and fixed the vulnerability but because the recovery mode is baked in at a hardware level they weren't able to patch it so what Nintendo did let's release a new patched switch starting in about mid 2018 so if you bought a switch before that you can do this probably and if you want after that you probably can't by the way if you like the dark science of installing us is where they don't belong make sure you're subscribed so you catch our upcoming video about making a hackintosh laptop or as we call it a hack top coming soon I was always really excited about this concept and I'm glad that we were actually able to do it because the possibility of running Android on a switch is just it's so interesting to me I held off buying a switch actually until just last year since then I love how portable it is but yeah you can get a controller and a mount and run emulators and stream games on your phone just fine right for this Android side of the experi if you want this but it's just not the same as having a singular gaming device for nintendo games game streaming retro games and yes I acknowledge the switch root project has a ways to go and probably won't get where they would need to get to given that it's compatible only with early manufacturing units of one console it's true it's true but if they continue to refine the experience I feel like this might be this could be the ultimate gaming device okay right portable yes docked all that covery console mm-hmm that's cool it's too bad you waited so long and ended up with a non model I can't do this on my switch so but I did it on yours yes and that's what's important the good news is you can buy a switch a used one online and if you ask for the serial number you can throw it into a utility to find out if it's hackable so maybe that's your solution Reilly maybe maybe sell my switch buy another one yeah under model and good luck with that weird speaking of things to be lucky about its lucky I had this Segway in my back pocket main gears vector gaming laptop is available at 25 Micro Center locations as well as on Amazon it's 99.999 at my crescendo calm and 11 9999 on their Amazon listing it features a core i7 97 58 processor at 2.6 gigahertz base NVIDIA GeForce GTX 16 60 TI graphics 16 gigs of DDR 4 memory a 512 gig nvme solid-state drive and a 15.6 inch 144 Hertz felitti display check it and other Micro Center specials out now at the links in the video description cannot aim for crap on this thing well there it is guys if you're looking for something else to watch now why don't you go check out part 4 of our hack Pro build happens it's we we show Apple what's up

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 4,268,109

Keywords: android, switch, tablet, gaming, emulation, xbox, snes, n64, playstation, gamecube

Id: REx_qSTulJM

Length: 18min 54sec (1134 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 22 2020