Moonlight for Android — trexx fork

A fork of Moonlight for Android, the open-source client for Sunshine and NVIDIA GameStream, cut down for Android TV boxes and tuned for latency. It runs on any device with Android 11 (API 30) or newer and an ARM CPU (arm64-v8a or armeabi-v7a; there is no x86 build), targets Sunshine hosts, and is English-only.

It is not published to any store. Build it from source (below) or take the signed APK from a Build workflow run. Upstream's own releases are on moonlight-stream.org, with a Discord.

Browse — rail, hosts, apps	Settings — six screens, build in the corner
In-stream menu (Back, or hold Start)	Performance overlay, toggled mid-stream
Special keys the client would otherwise swallow	Controllers — pairing and pad headphone audio

Taken on an Android TV box streaming Steam from Sunshine.

• Xbox Wireless Adapter, natively. The USB dongle is driven by a GIP driver derived from medusalix/xow (d335d602, see UPSTREAM.md) — no Bluetooth, no root, several pads on one adapter. Since the port:
  • Audio to the pad's headphone jack, wirelessly or over a cable (isochronous USB), toggled per pad from the in-stream menu
  • Both security handshakes, v1 RSA and v2 ECDH
  • Fragmented-message reassembly
  • Battery reporting
  • A guide-LED brightness setting
• Switch Pro Controller over USB with motion. Gyro, accelerometer and rumble reach the host, with factory and user calibration read from the pad's flash. Opt-in: both USB-driver settings must be on, otherwise the kernel driver keeps it.
• More pads recognised. SDL controller database refreshed (529 → 613 devices, tracked by a scheduled CI job), Xbox Series init over USB, 8BitDo Xbox-mode pads, PowerA Pro (Switch) matched by name, Steam controllers reported as their own type.

• Picture data is written straight into the decoder's input buffer; the min-latency pacer stamps frames with SurfaceFlinger's own clock, so stale frames are dropped instead of queued; the output queue is an int ring buffer; ADPF performance hints report the frame's work (API 31 and newer).
• Per-controller and per-packet allocation, JNI round-trips and logging are off the hot paths, and the overlay is formatted off the decode thread.
• Frame timestamps in microseconds end-to-end; fractional refresh rates (59.94) actually reach Sunshine; FEC on nanors.
• HEVC reference-frame invalidation is withheld from Amlogic decoders that corrupt with it; AV1 RFI backs off after a decoder crash.
• Settings: stream encryption (None / Audio only / Audio and video — it used to be silently decided by the CPU), intra refresh, and a per-install client ID so Sunshine can tell clients apart.
• Launches retry, pairing is cancellable, and a malformed app list or a broken GameManager no longer crashes the app.

• Low-latency AAudio output (opt-in) for boxes that refuse AudioTrack's fast path — a lock-free ring buffer feeding the realtime callback, surround masks passed straight through, AudioTrack as the fallback.
• Continuous audio (opt-in) keeps a Sunshine host sending during silence, so a quiet stream and a dead one no longer look the same.
• libopus 1.6.1.

• Browse screen rebuilt on the platform framework: a rail (Add PC, Settings), a host band and one fixed-size app grid, with d-pad focus rings and TV overscan in the layout.
• In-stream menu on Back or a held Start: on-screen keyboard, special keys (Esc, F11, Alt+Enter, Alt+F4, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Shift+Esc, Win, Win+D, Win+G, Win+Shift+Left, Shift+Tab), controller options, the performance overlay, and Disconnect. Back no longer ends the stream, and holding Start no longer toggles mouse emulation — both are in the menu now.
• One menu style everywhere. Host, app and in-stream menus share one presenter and one row size; no input device gets a different form.
• Settings in six screens — Video & Display, Audio, Controllers, Mouse & Keyboard, Host & Connection, Advanced & Diagnostics — with the build's version and commit in the corner.
• The on-screen keyboard types keystrokes, so games see them, with a preview strip that echoes the line being typed and host-side text reconciled against what the IME has.

• The overlay reports FEC recovery, decrypt failures (only when non-zero), the worst frame of the window and host processing latency, and plots FPS in/out and network latency against time. It can be toggled mid-stream, and is formatted off the decode thread.
• Debug builds also keep per-frame latency percentiles and emit Perfetto trace spans on the video path; both are compiled out of release.
• Every stream ends with a summary in the log, not just the ones that crash.

• Mbed TLS 3.6.7 on its PSA API replaces OpenSSL 1.1.1 for stream crypto, built from a submodule with only AES-CBC, AES-GCM and CTR-DRBG. Hardware AES is compiled in for both ABIs, including the ARMv8 extensions in the 32-bit build. Native library: 2.2 MB → ~0.4 MB, and 22 MB of prebuilt static libraries left the repository.
• Toolchain, kept current by Renovate:
  • AGP 9.4.0, Gradle 9.6.1, Java 26, NDK r29
  • compileSdk 37, minSdk 30, targetSdk 34
  • OkHttp 5.5.0, BouncyCastle 1.86, libusb 1.0.30
• Raising minSdk to 30 removed 111 OS-version checks and the rooted build flavour; the branch is roughly 48,000 lines lighter than upstream.
• A JVM unit test suite (./gradlew testDebugUnitTest) with coverage, run by CI alongside the build; CI also reports APK size and DEX method count against master.

Each of these was deleted rather than carried:

• mDNS host discovery — PCs are added by address
• Translations — the fork is English-only
• GeForce Experience-specific handling
• Pen and touchscreen input — controller touchpads still work
• The in-app help WebView
• The metered-network bitrate
• The system equalizer
• Wake-on-LAN and STUN
• The on-screen virtual controller
• Picture-in-picture, DeX and multi-window
• Phone-vibrator rumble and phone-sensor motion
• The network connection test
• The "small box art" and "Soft keyboard text input" settings

• Install Android Studio, a JDK 17 or later to run Gradle, and Python 3.
• git submodule update --init --recursive
• git fetch --depth=1 origin '+refs/tags/v*:refs/tags/v*' — versionName comes from the highest v* tag, and a clone without one fails to configure.
• ./gradlew assembleRelease (or Android Studio). The JDK 26 toolchain that compiles Java and the pinned NDK are downloaded automatically.

Carried patches. Upstream fixes this fork needs but that have not merged are kept as diffs under patches/ and applied to the submodule's working tree before ndk-build by scripts/apply-native-patches.py, which runs from preBuild (hence Python). The submodule pointer never moves, so the parent repo still shows exactly which upstream commit is built against. Currently carried against moonlight-common-c (pinned at 62e0663):

• Decrypt-failure counters (0002)
• Atomics for ConnectionInterrupted and the blocking queue's size (0004)
• The intra-refresh capability (0005)

./gradlew testDebugUnitTest runs the JVM tests on any machine, without a device or the NDK. Everything that touches input, audio or the decoder needs real hardware and a real host; HARDWARE_TESTING.md is the checklist of what has been verified, on what, and what is still outstanding. CLAUDE.md holds the engineering rules — which paths are hot, what may not be allocated on them, and how to instrument a change.

Moonlight is the work of Cameron Gutman, Diego Waxemberg, Aaron Neyer and Andrew Hennessy, students at Case Western, and was started as a project at MHacks. Moonlight also has a PC client and an iOS/tvOS client.

The Xbox Wireless Adapter driver is derived from xow by medusalix, ported to Android by Hakusai Zhang, and first brought to Moonlight by summershrimp in moonlight-android#1415 (branch). The GIP protocol work draws on xone and Microsoft's published GIP USB spec.

Backported from upstream Moonlight:

• moonlight-android#1219 — Allow toggling performance overlay while streaming
• moonlight-android#1461 — Add vendor 8BitDo to XboxOneController
• moonlight-android#1478 — Add Xbox Series S/X controllers to the Xbox One driver
• moonlight-android#1516 — Update UI helper to not fail on Meta Quest devices
• moonlight-android#1565 — Disable HEVC RFI on unconfirmed Amlogic decoders
• moonlight-android#1582 — Fix missing shift modifier for plus key
• moonlight-common-c#97 — Intra refresh support
• moonlight-common-c#147 — Request an IDR frame when the FEC queue reports a loss without RFI

From ClassicOldSong's Artemis fork:

• ClassicOldSong#571 — Add PowerA Pro controller support
• ClassicOldSong#567 — Native AAudio low-latency renderer, which diagnosed the AudioTrack fast-path problem behind upstream issues #1423, #1238 and #1161 (audio delay on Android TV). This fork's renderer is its own implementation, not a port.