TL;DR
- Ever spotted an emulator for Android with an unusual reference in its package name? There’s a good reason why.
- Phones that “cheat” at benchmarks by unthrottling performance for specific apps can often be tricked by a simple name-change.
- This approach isn’t without its trade-offs, and not all phones will respond the same.
Video game emulation has been pushing boundaries for decades, and it’s just as exciting to see a PlayStation 4 being emulated in 2025 as it was to first witness GameBoy games running on a 486. Because emulators have to do just so much computation to effectively simulate one computer inside another, we regularly see emulation targets lagging a generation or two behind the systems we’re running these apps on. But for Android-based emulators in particular, it turns out there’s a little trick that some use to squeeze more performance out of your device than might be available to the average app.
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