With Nintendo now committed to mobile gaming, new rumours suggest that the upcoming Nintendo NX could be utilising Android as its primary operating system.
So we already know that Nintendo is working with Japanese mobile games publisher DeNA to bring their games to smartphones. Well, now it seems the the upcoming Nintendo NX games console could potentially run Android as its primary operating system.
Very little is known about the NX except that it will still be a ‘dedicated console’. The system was revealed briefly in March on a single presentation slide which outlined cross-platform membership targets. Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata has mentioned the console in passing only, with nothing currently known about its internal hardware.
As an operating system for running video games, Android is still less than ideal unless it undergoes some heavy modifications. Nvidia has used the OS in some of their gaming devices such as The Shield but it utilises a custom launcher and hardware optimisations. Android M will bring some big performance increases over its predecessors but typically a console OS is fairly light on requirement so as to maximise performance. For Nintendo to make it work, they would need to strip back the OS to maximise resources.
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