Banana Native gets Mario Kart World running on Android, just about

November 4, 2026

Banana Native’s first public Android build can get Mario Kart World into a race and run Donkey Kong Bananza, according to developer moceure. That’s on a single Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 phone with 16 GB of RAM. In Mario Kart, you can drive, finish a race and head back to character selection, only to find the 3D scene has gone black. That gives you a fair idea of where version 0.1.0 stands.

Banana Native is moceure’s Android port of nxnative by seedds. It prepares the game’s ARM64 code so the phone’s CPU can run it directly. A compatibility layer handles the Switch 2 system calls, while the graphics side translates the game’s shaders for Vulkan using work from Ryujinx. The APK contains the launcher and runtime. You supply the game.

Mind the missing road

Mario Kart World needs the 1.8.0 base game. The developer reports flickering trees, missing ground textures and memory pressure even on the 16 GB test phone. Donkey Kong Bananza fares better with update 458752, though some cave fights still have texture glitches. New areas can stutter and sustained heat can pull the frame rate down. The developer recommends a cooler, particularly for Mario Kart, and hasn’t published a sustained Android frame rate for either game.

Gameplay as posted by u/Warm_Ad4401

Trying it takes some serious harware. You need Android 13 or newer, a Snapdragon chip with Adreno graphics, at least 12 GB of RAM and your own extracted game dump. NSP and XCI files won’t work. Donkey Kong can be prepared on the phone in about an hour, according to the developer. Mario Kart currently runs out of memory during that step and needs a Mac to prepare the files first.

Most of the code was written with Claude and tested by hand. For now, the interesting result is that two specific Switch 2 builds reach gameplay on Android, but it is still early to call them “ported”. The project will likely improve in time, so take this as a proof of concept that in this day and age, anything is possible.