How to use your Android phone as a PC game controller

A modern Android phone has everything a game controller needs: a multi-touch screen, a motion sensor, a vibration motor and a fast wireless radio. What it lacks is a way to tell your PC that it is a controller. GamepadOS supplies that missing piece. Your phone sends its touches and tilts to a small program on your PC, and the PC presents them to games as a normal Xbox 360 controller.

This guide explains what you need, how the pieces fit together, what the experience is like and where a phone controller works well or badly. If you just want to get going, jump to the setup guide.

What you need

• An Android phone running Android 9 or newer. iPhones are not supported yet.
• A Windows 10 or 11 PC. macOS and Linux are not supported.
• The GamepadOS Android app from Google Play or the direct download, and the GamepadOS PC server installer from this site. Both are free to start.
• A connection between them: either the same Wi-Fi network, or a USB cable.

You do not need a router that supports anything special, a Bluetooth adapter or an account to get started. The first time you run the PC server it installs a small driver called ViGEmBus, which is what lets Windows create a virtual controller. Windows asks for permission once.

How it works

There are three parts in the chain.

1. The phone app draws your controller on the screen. When you touch a button, drag a stick or tilt the phone, the app turns that into a small packet of controller state.
2. The link carries those packets to your PC. Over Wi-Fi they travel as UDP traffic on your local network. Over USB they travel through the cable, using either USB tethering or USB debugging. Either way, nothing goes through the internet.
3. The PC server receives the packets and writes them to a virtual Xbox 360 controller. To Windows and to your games this looks like a pad you plugged in.

Because the virtual device is a standard Xbox 360 controller, it works with the huge range of games and emulators that already support one. Games that only read keyboard and mouse will not respond to it. Our explanation of Xbox 360 emulation covers why that choice matters.

Is it fast enough to play?

For most games, yes. In our own measurements a round trip over a USB connection takes about 2.5 milliseconds, and a well-tuned 5 GHz Wi-Fi network lands in the low double digits. Those are network figures. The total delay you feel from touching the glass to something happening in the game also includes your phone's touchscreen sampling and the game's own input timing, which is why a fast phone helps as much as a fast network. The guide on where controller latency comes from breaks the whole chain down.

A phone will never feel identical to a physical pad with hardware triggers. It does feel responsive enough for racing games, platformers, emulated classics and most action games. Competitive shooters at a high level are where a physical controller or mouse still has the edge.

What a phone controller is especially good at

• Racing games. Tilt steering turns the phone into a wheel. You can even mount the phone and rotate it for multi-turn truck and bus steering. See gyro steering and wheel mode.
• Custom layouts. A physical pad has fixed buttons. On a screen you can move, resize and remove controls until the layout fits your hands and your game. The layout builder guide shows how.
• Emulators and retro games. A layout with just a D-pad and four buttons is easy to build and easy to hold.
• A spare controller. If a guest turns up and you own one pad, a second option in your pocket is useful. Note that GamepadOS connects one phone per server today.
• Feedback you can feel. Rumble from the game comes back to the phone, so hits and curbs buzz in your hands.

Where it is weaker

Touch controls have no physical edges, so your thumbs cannot find a button by feel. Good layout design reduces that problem (see designing a touch layout), but it does not disappear. Analog triggers are simulated with a sliding finger rather than a spring. And your phone battery drains faster with the screen on and the radio busy, so a charger or a power bank helps on long sessions.

What it costs

The apps are free to download. Every install gets 30 minutes of free play to start, with no account needed. After that you can watch a short optional ad for 30 more minutes, or buy Lifetime for unlimited play. The details are in how free play time works.

Next steps

Follow the step-by-step setup guide, then decide between Wi-Fi and USB for your room and your games. Most people are playing within a few minutes of starting.