Devices with ARM Mali graphics now run

Blender 5.3.0 Alpha for Android

Unofficial, experimental build. Android 12 or newer, arm64 only.

Signed with the same key as the previous release, so it installs over it as an update. No need to uninstall first, and preferences are kept.

If an earlier build refused to start, try this one

More devices are supported now. Blender required three GPU features that ARM's Mali driver does not provide, and never used two of them. Every device with Mali graphics was turned away before anything could appear on screen, and turned away in silence, because the reason was only written to a log a developer would need a cable to read.

That affects a large share of non-Qualcomm phones and tablets. If a previous release started and then closed itself, or never drew anything, this one is worth another try.

And when something does go wrong, there is now something to send: see Reporting a problem below.

Two builds

blender-full.apk (272 MB) - everything: Cycles, USD, OpenVDB, Alembic, MaterialX, LLVM, video, simulation.
blender-lite.apk (193 MB) - modelling, sculpting and animation with EEVEE and Workbench. For weaker devices, and for work where the path tracer and the exchange formats are not needed.

Both carry the same interface, add-ons, touch handling, languages and brushes.

The lite build leaves out Cycles and its denoising, video (ffmpeg), USD, Alembic, OpenVDB, MaterialX, LLVM, fluid and smoke simulation, the Ocean modifier, motion tracking, the exact and manifold boolean solvers, Draco compressed glTF and PDF export. Everything listed under "New since the previous release" below applies to the full build; the lite build gets the interface, touch, content and stability changes but not the new rendering and simulation features.

New in alpha 3

Devices with ARM Mali graphics now run. Three GPU features were required that ARM does not expose. Two of them, dual source blending and vertex stage stores, are never used by Blender at all. The third, clip distance, is used only by the viewport clipping region, so it costs that feature rather than the renderer. Tested on a Mali-G57 MC2 with ARM's r32p1 driver.
A startup log you can send. Everything Blender prints while starting is written to Download/blender-startup.log, and the app shows the location when it opens. It is rewritten on each launch.
When a GPU is refused, the log now names the device and the reason instead of reporting only that no suitable device was found.

Reporting a problem

Attach Download/blender-startup.log. It records how far startup got and which GPU was chosen, and it is written even when the app closes immediately, which is exactly the case that used to leave nothing behind.

New in alpha 2

How it is built

The port no longer builds its own dependencies. It takes the prebuilt Android library set published by the Blender project, the same way every other platform consumes its lib/<platform> set. That single change is what made most of the rendering and format support below possible, and it is why the two lists are as long as they are.

For anyone building from source, the procedure is different from the previous release. There is no dependency build step any more, only a submodule to fetch, and NDK r30 or newer is required rather than merely preferred: the archives are built with clang 21 and reference a libc++ internal that older NDKs do not provide, which can produce an APK that installs and then dies at startup.

Rendering and simulation

Video is back. ffmpeg is linked in again, so video strips, movie textures and rendering to a video file all work.
Cycles denoising with OpenImageDenoise, so renders come out clean instead of grainy.
Fluid and smoke simulation (Mantaflow), and the Ocean modifier.
Path guiding for Cycles.
Exact and manifold boolean solvers, so cutting shapes no longer leaves holes.
Motion tracking.
Draco compressed glTF, which is what most .glb files use.
PDF export from Grease Pencil.

Content that was missing

Brushes and assets. The essentials asset library now ships in the APK. Without it there was not a single brush in sculpt, texture paint, vertex paint, weight paint, grease pencil or curves, and the bundled node groups were absent.
49 interface languages.
Online extensions. The Get Extensions panel lists and installs add-ons from extensions.blender.org. pip is included, so add-ons can install their own Python packages.
LoopTools ships in the build.
USD import and export register correctly.

Touch and stylus

Drag anywhere on a panel, header or tool bar with one finger to scroll it. A tap still presses the button under your finger.
Three fingers pan the 3D view. Two fingers orbit and pinch to zoom.
Stylus pressure reaches 100% with a normal press. Android reports pressure against a range no hand can reach, so a pen stroke used to come out weaker than a finger no matter how hard you pressed.
On-screen keyboard, with a button in the status bar to summon it.
The screen follows the tablet between both landscape orientations. It used to be pinned to one, so turning the device around left the interface upside down. Portrait is still not offered.

Interface

Interface scale and editor borders start larger, sized for a tablet rather than a monitor.
Renders, the file browser and the preferences open as a maximized area. A single window is all the platform provides, so "New Window" could not work and rendering previously failed to open anything at all.
A splash screen while the runtime unpacks, instead of a white window.

Stability

Large scenes no longer close the app without warning. Texture size is capped by default; a scene with a dozen 4K maps used to exhaust the graphics memory and be killed by the system with nothing in the log.
Auto-save works, so there is crash recovery. Blender had no usable temporary directory on Android and fell back to one that does not exist there, so every auto-save was written into nothing. After an unexpected close, use File then Recover then Auto Save.
GPU subdivision falls back to the CPU when the driver refuses it.
Workarounds for Adreno drivers that reject valid compute pipelines and pipeline libraries.

Known issues

The first launch after installing takes a while and shows only the splash screen. Around 100 MB of runtime data is unpacked, once per install.
The Online Essentials asset library does not work. It downloads through a separate process, and Android has no working named semaphores, so Python cannot build the module it needs. The bundled essentials, which is where the brushes come from, are unaffected.
The app can stop responding during heavy work, such as opening a large scene for the first time, and Android may offer to close it. Waiting is usually enough. It is caused by shader compilation blocking the frame, not by a hang.
A heavy scene can be closed by the system without warning. Android reclaims memory from the foreground app when the device runs short, and Blender then disappears with no message. Recover through File then Recover then Auto Save. Recover Last Session is not the one to reach for: it reads a file written only on a clean exit, so after an unexpected close it returns an older state.
No portrait. The screen turns between the two landscape orientations, but portrait is not offered. This is deliberate.
The viewport clipping region does not work on GPUs without clip distance support, which includes Mali. Nothing else depends on it.
Installing the full build over the lite one leaves Cycles switched off. Preferences are kept across the change, and the lite build has no Cycles to enable, so the add-on stays disabled and the render engine does not appear. Turn it on in Preferences, Add-ons, or load factory settings.
Reading and writing .blend files outside the app needs the "All files access" permission, which is requested on first launch.

Tested on

Three GPU vendors, three drivers:

Galaxy Tab S7 FE (SM-T733, Adreno 642L, Qualcomm driver, Vulkan 1.1)
Galaxy S22 Ultra (SM-S908B, Xclipse 920, Samsung driver)
Viewedge Tab 11 (Mediatek Helio G99 / MT6789, Mali-G57 MC2, ARM driver r32p1, Vulkan 1.1), reported by a user

Other arm64 devices with Vulkan 1.1 or newer should work. Mobile GPU drivers vary a great deal, so a device that fails is interesting rather than surprising.

Another build worth knowing about

Wanderson Magalhaes maintains a parallel Android build, developed on a Galaxy S24 Ultra: https://github.com/Wanderson-Magalhaes/blender_for_android

If you have an S24 Ultra, or another device with an Adreno 750, prefer his build. He found and worked around driver problems specific to that GPU which this build does not carry: it refuses several compute pipelines that are perfectly valid, and without those workarounds the app comes up to a grey screen.

His build also works in portrait. This one turns between the two landscape orientations only, and that is a deliberate choice here rather than something unfinished, so if you want portrait, his is the one to use.

Several improvements in this release came from his work, adapted here: the on-screen keyboard, the Vulkan changes he made for the Adreno 750 in the S24 Ultra, the stylus pressure calibration, the interface defaults for a touch device, the texture size cap that stops large scenes being killed, and the approach to packaging the essentials assets, translations and the Python interpreter. Thanks to him for the debugging and for publishing what he found.

Source

Built from the android branch. It is GPL, like Blender itself, and the matching source is in the repository this release comes from. The prebuilt dependency set is a submodule of that branch, and its address now points at the repository's current home, so a fresh clone can fetch it over HTTPS without a Blender account.

This is not an official Blender build and is not supported by the Blender Foundation. If you would like an official Android version to exist, supporting Blender development is the way to help: https://fund.blender.org/