WindowsForum could not retrieve Dolphin's official Release 2609 post. The feature details, report counts and cryptominer episode below come from Notebookcheck's reading of that report, and no other outlet has covered this release yet. The official Dolphin records we could reach support the background: Dolphin's cadence of numbered releases, and how limited Android Netplay used to be.
Dolphin Release 2609 opens Netplay across operating systems and brings it to Android
Notebookcheck calls cross-platform Netplay the biggest change in the report. It describes it as turning Netplay into a fully cross-platform experience—previously, Dolphin Netplay required that both players be on the same operating system. The report's own screenshot shows Dolphin Netplay running Star Fox: Assault across two different Android devices.
Netplay is Dolphin's own online multiplayer. Dolphin's documentation says it allows you to set up online sessions for any GameCube or Wii title with a local multiplayer mode, without the problems or limitations of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection or hassle of the BBA. The same guide sets a basic rule: The game you want to play MUST be in every player and/or spectator's gamelist. The guide also says bandwidth requirements are very light: any DSL or Cable internet connection should do.
For Android users this is new ground. Dolphin's official Netplay Guide, as indexed at the time of writing, still says Netplay is only for the Desktop version of Dolphin. Dolphin on Android does not currently support Netplay. Notebookcheck describes the old limit as a same-operating-system requirement. The official guide describes an Android app with no Netplay at all. Both lead to the same place: before Release 2609, a phone or tablet user could not join a friend's Windows PC in a Dolphin Netplay session. The guide page probably just hasn't caught up with the release, so Android users shouldn't take it as the current word.
Notebookcheck also points to Steam Remote Play and Parsec as the workarounds people used before. Those tools stream video from a single host machine instead of running the game on each player's device. A native option means each player runs Dolphin locally, on whatever platform they own.
Desync warnings put limits on cross-platform Dolphin Netplay
The Dolphin team doesn't oversell the feature. A caption from the report warns that even on different x86 PC architectures but especially on Android, Dolphin's crossplay netplay will desync eventually. Players should read that as a known limit of the design, not a bug that will be patched out soon.
A desync happens when the players' emulated games drift apart, so each person ends up seeing a different game state. Here's some general context, not something the Release 2609 coverage spells out: Netplay works by having each participant run the same game and exchange inputs, which is why every player needs a copy of the game. A community explanation from an earlier Netplay overhaul describes it as peer-to-peer play that basically "emulates" local play. Our inference is that any small difference in how two machines run the emulated hardware can eventually break a session. That's more likely when an ARM phone is paired with an x86 desktop, or with a different x86 processor.
Dolphin's own guide has long set expectations by console, too. It says GameCube Netplay should be painless. Wii Netplay is much more temperamental and should be treated as an experimental feature for advanced users. Nothing in the Release 2609 coverage says cross-platform play changes that. For now, the safer bet is shorter GameCube sessions, especially when an Android device is involved.
The desync problem also explains why the team has spent effort on features that don't touch game state. The June Release 2606 report added custom screen cropping for split-screen games and noted that unlike viewport cheats that some NetPlay communities have used, cropping doesn't affect the game whatsoever and doesn't risk desyncing. That cropping option, according to the same report, lives in Graphics -> Advanced, in both our Qt and Android GUIs. So Android players now have both Netplay and the crop tool built for online split-screen play.
Rumble, settings search and DolphinBar Balance Board support tidy up Dolphin for Android
The Android changes go beyond Netplay. Notebookcheck lists better rumble support, Dolphin settings appearing in Android's system-wide settings search, and better Wii Balance Board support through the MayFlash DolphinBar. The DolphinBar is a USB sensor bar made for connecting real Wii peripherals to an emulator.
The rumble work covers two things. Notebookcheck says controller compatibility is better, and touch feedback and vibration can now be turned off separately. Before, a player who wanted controller rumble in games but disliked the phone buzzing on every on-screen button press had to take both or neither. Now those are two separate settings.
Settings-search integration is a small but real convenience. Typing a Dolphin option into the Android system search box should now surface it. The coverage doesn't give the exact settings path, the minimum Android version for this integration, or a list of controllers covered by the rumble changes. Dolphin's general requirements, per its repository, are Android 7.0 or newer and a 64-bit-capable processor. Those are project-wide minimums, not requirements introduced by Release 2609.
For the Balance Board, Notebookcheck reports better support through the DolphinBar but no details on firmware, pairing steps or which games benefit. Owners of that hardware should treat this as a reason to try the board again, not a promise that every Wii Fit–style game will work.
CMake replaces Visual Studio project files for Dolphin's Windows builds
Two changes in Release 2609 matter to people outside Android. The first is an option to show the XFB (external framebuffer) resolution in Dolphin's on-screen display. This can be informative, since the Nintendo GameCube and Wii both used non-square pixels. In practice, the resolution a game renders at internally isn't always what ends up on screen. A readout makes it easier to diagnose scaling and aspect-ratio problems, or to confirm what a game is actually outputting.
The second is a build-system change for Windows. Notebookcheck reports a purging of Visual Studio build files thanks to the use of CMake, which should reduce the need to manually update Visual Studio for Windows users. CMake is a cross-platform build generator. Instead of maintaining hand-written Visual Studio project and solution files next to the build scripts for other platforms, a project describes its build once and CMake generates the right files for each toolchain.
The "Windows users" affected here are mostly people who compile Dolphin from source, plus contributors working in Visual Studio. People who download prebuilt Windows releases won't notice any runtime difference, and the coverage claims none. For developers it means one less set of project files that can drift out of sync with the rest of the codebase, and less time spent fixing a Visual Studio project after a toolchain update. The coverage doesn't state a minimum CMake or Visual Studio version, so anyone building locally should expect to pull the current source and let CMake generate the solution, not reuse an old one.
AI-assisted bug hunting floods Dolphin with security reports
The report's most widely relevant section concerns security intake, not emulation. Notebookcheck reports that this year to date, the team has received "more than 10 reports," and that's more than in the past ten years combined. Ten reports sounds small, and the coverage admits the raw numbers won't look dramatic. For a volunteer emulator project, going from fewer than one security report a year to more than ten in nine months is a big jump in triage work.
Notebookcheck puts the cause down to lower barriers: A single security issue in Dolphin used to take up its own Progress Reports, but now all an amateur bug hunter needs to crack open Dolphin is an AI agent. It adds that most of the reported issues were simple buffer overflows, like the single bug Dolphin covered in its April 2024 progress report. The coverage gives no breakdown of how many reports were valid, how severe they were, or whether any affected people playing ordinary retail games. The "AI attacks" framing in the original headline describes a flood of AI-assisted reports. It does not mean anyone has attacked Dolphin users.
The team's response is procedural. Dolphin has turned on GitHub's vulnerability reporting flow to divert security bugs away from the standard bug tracker, in Notebookcheck's words. This does two things. Security reports stop appearing in the public issue tracker, where anyone could read an unpatched flaw. Maintainers also get a dedicated queue they can prioritize without it crowding out ordinary compatibility bugs. Notebookcheck's view is that security fixes have to come first regardless, and that this is simply what maintaining software in 2026 looks like.
The same section mentions a scare over a possible cryptominer in Dolphin's macOS build. Per the coverage, the suspicion turned out to be unfounded. No details of the investigation were available, so the only takeaway is that Mac users have no confirmed incident to act on.
Other open-source maintainers will recognize the pattern. The work of finding a plausible memory-safety bug and writing it up has dropped sharply. The work of checking, reproducing and fixing it hasn't. Dolphin's fix, a private and separate intake channel, is cheap and uses a feature GitHub already has.
What this means for you
Whether to update depends on which Dolphin user you are. Android players who want online multiplayer have the strongest reason to move to Release 2609 or a later build. Windows, macOS and Linux players only gain something if they have friends on other platforms. Anyone building from source on Windows should switch to the CMake workflow.
- Android users can now join Dolphin Netplay sessions, including with players on other operating systems, but everyone still needs the same game in their game list.
- Cross-platform sessions will eventually desync, especially with an Android device, so GameCube titles and shorter sessions are the practical choice while Wii Netplay stays experimental.
- Dolphin's official Netplay Guide still says Android has no Netplay support, so trust the release notes over that page until it's updated.
- Android players who found the haptic feedback annoying can now turn off touch feedback without losing controller rumble.
- Windows developers compiling Dolphin should generate their Visual Studio solution from CMake, since the hand-maintained Visual Studio build files have been removed.
- Security researchers should report Dolphin vulnerabilities through the project's GitHub private reporting channel, not the public issue tracker.
Release 2609 adds up to a substantial Android release with an honest caveat attached: Netplay now crosses platform lines, but the team says plainly that mixed-hardware sessions won't stay in sync forever. Behind the features is the security story, where a small project had to change how it accepts reports because AI tools made filing them easy. Dolphin's June report came out late in the month because, as its authors wrote, a slew of important, large, and technically challenging changes had us working overtime. The next monthly report will show whether the new GitHub intake keeps security work from taking over that schedule.