Kitsune

A lean Android gaming emulator for Windows. No ads, no telemetry, no bloat. Just the fastest open emulator core there is, set up for games.

Download Kitsune 0.2.0 for Windows (64-bit)

Zip, about 0 MB. Unzip anywhere and run Kitsune.exe. No installer, no .NET to install. SHA-256: d8daeab425bc9ce9b3d4222c0a3778153688a7806213ef699ceea3c7a16df359

Google's emulator core

The Android Emulator from AOSP, the one Android Studio ships. Apache-2.0, auditable, maintained by Google.

Hardware acceleration

Picks AEHD (Google's kernel driver, direct VT-x) or WHPX for you. Host OpenGL and Vulkan on your real GPU, pinned to the discrete card on laptops.

ARM games run

Google Play x86_64 images include libndk_translation, so arm64-only games work.

Keymapper that doesn't lag

Keyboard and mouse become multitouch through the emulator's gRPC control stream, straight into the virtual touchscreen. Joystick, autofire, swipes, pinch, mouse-look.

Nothing phones home

Metrics off, crash reporting off, no account, no launcher ads. It talks to dl.google.com only when you click install.

Play Store built in

Android 15 Google Play image by default; other versions one click away.

Requirements

Windows 10 2004 or Windows 11, 64-bit, with VT-x or AMD-V enabled in the firmware.
About 3 GB of disk for the emulator and one Android image, 8 GB of RAM or more.
For the fastest path (AEHD): Hyper-V, Virtual Machine Platform, WSL2 and memory integrity off. If you need those, Kitsune uses WHPX instead.

First run

Unzip, run Kitsune.exe.
Click Install / update components. It downloads the emulator, adb and the Android 15 Play image (about 2.1 GB) from Google and verifies every checksum.
Click Install AEHD driver and accept the one UAC prompt (skip on Hyper-V machines).
New to create an instance, then Launch. First boot takes under a minute; after that it resumes in seconds.
Pick a keymap profile and press Edit on screen to drag the key badges onto your game's buttons.

Windows SmartScreen may warn about an unsigned download the first time. Click "More info", then "Run anyway". The zip's SHA-256 above lets you check what you got.

What it will not do

Root on Play images	Google does not allow it. Pick a "Google APIs" image if you need root; it has no Play Store.
Hide from anti-emulator checks	Games that refuse emulators will refuse this one.
More than 6 CPU cores	The emulator caps vCPUs at 6.