How to use your phone as an Xbox controller for PC

Your phone already has a high-refresh touchscreen, Wi-Fi and a vibration motor. That is most of a controller.

What actually has to happen

A PC game does not read touchscreens. It asks Windows for a controller, through XInput, DirectInput, GameInput or — in a browser — the Gamepad API. So an app on your phone cannot simply "be" a controller: something on the PC has to present one that Windows believes in.

That is the whole design. PhonePad has two halves: an app on the phone that turns your thumbs into controller state, and a small program on the PC that creates a virtual Xbox 360 pad and drives it with whatever the phone sends. Windows lists it in joy.cpl like any other pad, and games cannot tell the difference — because at the level a game looks, there is no difference.

Why not Bluetooth

Phones cannot present themselves as a Bluetooth HID gamepad. That is a limitation of Android, not a gap somebody forgot to fill: the Bluetooth HID device role is not available to ordinary apps, and the handful of tools that claim otherwise are either rooted, vendor-specific, or actually doing something else.

Wi-Fi has no such restriction, and on a normal home network it is faster. Measured on a Galaxy S24 Ultra and a Windows 11 PC: 4.9–8.0 ms round trip, phone to PC and back. Bluetooth gamepads typically sit around 10 ms and up.

The five-minute version

Install ViGEmBus on the PC. The driver that lets a program create a virtual controller. Once, ever.
Run the PhonePad companion. One self-contained program. Allow it through the firewall for private networks.
Install the app on your phone and put both devices on the same Wi-Fi.
Tap your PC in the app and type the six digits it shows. Once — after that it connects straight through.

Download PhonePad Full guide

Does it work with every game?

With every game that supports an Xbox controller, which is nearly all of them on PC. Steam, Game Pass, emulators, itch.io downloads, browser games, and Xbox Cloud Gaming. There is no per-game configuration, because there is nothing game-specific happening — Windows has a controller, and the game finds it the way it finds any other.

Games that only read keyboard and mouse are the exception, and they were never going to work with a real Xbox pad either.

Is a touchscreen good enough?

For some things it is genuinely better than you expect, and for others it is not a physical stick and never will be. Being honest about which is which:

Buttons, D-pad, shoulders — fine. A tap is a tap.
Steering and driving — good, once the response is set up properly. Most on-screen controllers get this badly wrong; see below.
Camera and aiming — usable, and the weakest case. There is no spring pulling back to centre, so holding a slow pan takes attention.
Competitive shooters — no. Buy a controller.

The thing most on-screen controllers get wrong

They feel dead at the start of the travel and then far too sharp. That is two deadzones stacked on top of each other.

A physical stick needs an inner deadzone because it has spring slop and sensor drift to hide, and every game applies one on that assumption. A touchscreen has neither problem — your thumb is exactly where you put it. Add another deadzone in the app and roughly a quarter of your thumb's travel does nothing at all, then everything arrives at once.

PhonePad starts its output just past the deadzone the game applies, and spends the rest of your travel on the range the game responds to. The measured curves are on the documentation page.

Does it drain the battery?

Less than you would guess. The screen is the expensive part, not the networking — 40 bytes at 250 times a second is about 10 KB/s. Turning the brightness down does more for battery life than anything else you could change.

Is it safe on my network?

Pairing uses an X25519 exchange authenticated by the six-digit code, and every packet afterwards carries an authentication tag and passes a replay check — so nothing else on your network can inject input into your PC. Nothing leaves your network: no account, no server, no telemetry.