Why Are There No Wii U Emulator Android or iOS Options?

Don’t believe some of the other sites you’ll see on Google claiming that a Wii U emulator for Android or iOS devices exists. At the time of writing this article, there have been no Wii U emulators released for Android or iOS. Do not install any Android download APK files that these sites may offer as we can guarantee they not only won’t work, but may be filled with malware.

Read on to see why an Android or iOS emulator for the Wii U hasn’t yet been released and why we might still eventually see one someday.

The Wii U was an awesome console and personally one of my favorite Nintendo systems. That being said, at the time of its release up until the end of its lifecycle, the Nintendo Wii U didn’t perform all that well. The Wii U only sold around 13.5 million units total, a ridiculous drop from Nintendo’s previous system the Wii.

When we look at the low popularity and adoption of the Wii U, it starts to become clearer why we have yet to see a Wii U emulator for Android or iOS break onto the scene. We’ll be going into some additional reasons below and further expanding on some that we’ve already covered.

Why No Wii U Emulator for Android or iOS?

Hardware Requirements

The Wii U, although underpowered compared to modern day gaming consoles, is still a relatively powerful machine. When building an emulator, it’s often not the power of the original console that has to be taken into mind though, but rather the fact that actually emulating it can be extremely taxing on the system used to run the emulator.

This is because when you emulate a console on your Android or iOS device, you’re technically emulating the hardware that the original console used to run these games. That’s expensive in terms of resources required and often needs a high powered device that can handle this. This is often why emulating games on PC is much simpler than on devices like phones or tables simply because of the extra power that they have.

Emulating the Wii U’s hardware on mobile devices like Android or iOS requires significant processing power and memory accessibility which just wasn’t really feasible on most smart phones at the time that the Wii U released back in 2012. Although years have passed and smartphones now are certain capable or handling the power needed, emulators typically emerge on the scene a couple of years after the release of a console.

It’s likely that Wii U emulation just didn’t garner the audience needed to justify building out mobile emulation around that time and still just hasn’t the following it would need to be pushed forward.

Complexity of Emulation

The Wii U’s internal architecture is quite complex. If features a multi-core processor and its unique dual-screen GamePad setup with the external main TV display certainly further complicate things. Being able to emulate this setup on a handheld device not only is very challenging from a technical perspective, but mind boggling to say the least. How does one go about building this out in a feasible way that would work? Some games require the use of the GamePad in order to function and on a PC, you have the ability to dual screen or connect a GamePad to the PC and use physical GamePad touch input.

It’s possible that you could configure an option on Android and iOS devices that would stream the video output to a TV screen and allow you to use your mobile device as the GamePad, however this would likely lead to additional latency issues that would need to be optimized and corrected. This whole process seems complicated.

You could also potentially allow players to connect their GamePad to their smartphone, but using a secondary screen that’s even smaller than the GamePad itself seems a bit counterintuitive. From a technical standpoint, emulating the Wii U on an Android or iOS device is going to be quite a challenge.

Development Priorities

Emulator development usually is driven by community interest and individual developer motivation. Emulating a complex console like the Wii U may not have been a top priority for developers compared to other consoles or systems.

With the success and popularity of the Nintendo Switch abruptly bringing the Wii U’s lifecycle to a complete halt, any interest that still was potentially lingering in Wii U emulation very likely shifted over to Nintendo’s new hot handheld console hybrid that proved to be much simpler to emulate from a technical perspective.

Will There Ever Be A Wii U Emulator for Android or iOS?

There is a glimmer of hope out there. The best Wii U emulator for PC, Cemu, has finally announced that it has gone open source. This means that the once closed source Wii U emulator’s source code is now publicly available for anyone to take a look under the hood. This makes it much simpler to understand and potentially port to other architecture.

Be sure to check out our Cemu setup guide for installing the emulator.

For Android and iOS users, this could mean good news in the future. There have been some rumors online about certain teams working on mobile phone ports of Cemu and we might see some of these pop up any day now.

While nothing is certain just yet, Cemu went open source nearly a year ago now and if any developers have been working behind the scenes to port it to mobile devices, a year or two turnaround seems like a reasonable timeframe to expect some sort of announcement.

If in the future Cemu is ported to Android or iOS, we’ll be sure to update this article to let you know.