New Features

Companion Apps

Launch companion apps to automatically open alongside each game. You can find this in Y (Context Menu) -> Edit -> Companion App

Auto-Hide Dock

New option in Apperance settings to auto hide dock - hiding the dock and panels unless navigated down to allowing more space to see your game grid.

Dock Icon Style

Choose Android Icon Apps to apply to your dock icons. Can be found in Appearance settings

Single Screen improvements

• Optimised animations and single-screen mode
• Made transition when opening folders less jarring
• Drop shadow is now hidden when there's no hero
• TIP: Auto-Hide Dock is super nice on single screen mode where space is limited
• Made game logos size better

Fixes

• Fixed Audio issues
• Added clear option for jingles & companion apps
• Fixed RetroAchievements
• Option to disable folder previews in Hero Style Settings (no more transparent pngs!)
• Helped mitigate full RAM crashes with Now Playing on devices with less RAM while playing intensive games
• Fixed wallpaper getting cleared on crash
• Added version to about settings
• Improved RetroAchievements navigation
• Fixed non-english apps not showing up in app drawer

Cocoon Shell 2.1 Beta

⚠️ Heads up: If you have trouble launching games, go to Settings → Library & Data, delete each ROM path and platform, then re-add them. 2.1 includes permission changes that may require a one-time manual relink. This also fixes an issue where media randomly unlinks and games stop launching after a while. You should also rescrape your achievements using the Force All option to ensure everything is matched correctly.

2.1 is a massive one. We've been cooking this for a while and honestly, it touches almost every part of Cocoon. New screens, new audio, new ways to organise your library, a completely reworked theme system, and a whole keyboard on your bottom screen. Let's get into it.

Silk Pod

Silk Pod is Cocoon's community theme and asset store. Browse, download, and install themes and asset packs made by other users, or submit your own. You can find featured, popular, and newly uploaded content all in one place.

It's not just themes either. Silk Pod handles icon overlays, smart folder art, sound effects, and music packs. Access it in-app through Settings → Appearance → Silk Pod or browse the web version at cocoon-shell.com/themes.

Theme Builder

We built a whole web app for creating themes. The Theme Builder gives you a live dual-screen preview while you work and exports ready-to-use ZIPs that you can drop into your Cocoon directory or submit straight to Silk Pod.

You can create full themes with colours and wallpapers, icon overlays, smart folder artwork, sound effect packs, and music packs. Or import an existing ZIP to tweak it. It's all right there in the browser.

Now Playing

When you launch a game on a dual-screen device, your second screen is no longer just sitting there doing nothing. You get a full Now Playing view with your game art, session info, and quick access to your dock.

The whole thing has smooth animations going in and out, and when you're focused on your game it dims down to stay out of the way. Tap it and it comes right back.

We also added a Now Playing bar to the grid itself. Your tracked games sit on the left side of your grid so you can quickly jump back into them or end your session with Y.

Customise how it all looks and behaves in Settings → Appearance → Now Playing.

Game Jingles

You can now set audio files on your games that play when you hover over them, just like the 3DS banner jingles. Upload your own audio files per game, or set up Jingle Repositories in Settings → Library & Data to import from community GitHub repos, fully searchable and scrapable by name.

Quick note: we don't condone hosting copyrighted material. Cocoon has no control over user-run repositories and we won't be hosting our own. Use your own media at your own risk.

Check out the full guide on the Jingles wiki page and the example repository if you want to set up your own.

Flutterkey

An all-in-one keyboard, trackpad, and trackball for your bottom screen. This is our first "pod" and it's surprisingly fun to use.

It has two input modes:

• Mouse mode mirrors your top screen with a reflected cursor
• Touch mode injects touch gestures directly for pinpoint accuracy

Customise sensitivity, glide, and haptic feedback to your liking. If you're a fan of the Steam Deck trackpads, try Ball mode with touch mode and haptic feedback. It's really close to that same feel.

Game Sessions & Tracking

Game tracking has been completely rebuilt. When you launch a game, Cocoon starts a session and tracks your playtime down to the second. If Cocoon loses focus of the game, the session pauses. When the game comes back into focus it picks right back up automatically, whether you're coming from Android's task switcher or the Now Playing bar.

You can configure a Grace Period in settings that auto-ends your session after a set time if you don't reopen the game. No more phantom sessions running forever.

Discord Rich Presence is way better now too. It reflects your current game even while paused and only ends when you actually end the session or switch games. Timing is more accurate and art fallbacks are much smarter.

Android apps won't be tracked unless you've categorised them as a game. There's a new toggle in the edit dialog for that.

Theme Overhaul

Themes have been reworked pretty significantly.

Themes are now always modular and dynamically loaded. Nothing gets permanently copied into your base files anymore. The old Replace/Append system is gone. Instead, the theme menu now gives you individual dropdowns for each asset type so you can pick and choose exactly which parts of a theme to use. Colours from one theme, icons from another, music from a third. Full control.

All sound effects are now fully supported in themes. Exporting and importing has been fixed up to be consistent.

We also added a clear theme dialog so you can wipe specific parts of your theme setup without nuking the whole thing.

Multi-Select & Bulk Operations

Holding A on a game in Edit Grid mode now lets you multi-select. From there you can bulk move or remove games.

In smart folders, you can use Add to... to add your selected games to any folder. This works multiple times per game since we now support multiple shortcuts per game. On your home screen and in manual folders, Move to... moves selected games to a folder of your choice.

Search

You can search your games now. Hit Start → Search and find what you're looking for. Simple as that.

Add Games Grid

Tired of hunting through smart folders to add games one by one? Go to Start → New → Add Games and you'll get a grid of every game not currently on your home screen. Select a bunch and add them all at once.

App Shortcuts

Cocoon now picks up shortcuts from other apps on your device. If an app supports Android's "Add Shortcut" feature, it'll show up in Cocoon. So for example, GameNative's shortcuts just appear and you can add them like any other game, with full customisation support. Cocoon needs to be set as your default launcher for this to work.

Folder Improvements

• Games can live in multiple folders. Adding a game to a folder creates a shortcut, so the same game can appear on your home screen, in a genre folder, and in a favourites folder all at once
• New → Add Games now works inside folders too
• Deleting a folder gives you proper options: delete subfolders, remove games, or move them up to the parent/home

Highlight & Navigation

The highlight selection system got a full revamp. It no longer overshoots when the page is scrolling, follows items when you scroll with touch, and stops grid scroll inertia when you start navigating with a controller. Grid inertia in general is much snappier now, falling off faster instead of that slow drift.

Settings navigation has been improved too. Items are no longer slightly offscreen or hidden under gradients, and autoscroll keeps the focused item properly visible with better padding.

Now Playing & Game Resume

Emulators no longer restart your games when you try to resume them. Minimising and reopening through Now Playing properly resumes from where you left off. This one was driving people nuts and it's finally sorted.

RetroAchievements

Scraping now automatically matches your games to RetroAchievements entries using intelligent fuzzy name matching. It handles region tags, version info, and other filename quirks so you don't have to clean anything up yourself.

If the auto-detection gets it wrong, you can override it. Open the edit dialog on any game and you'll see a RetroAchievements Game dropdown with the top candidates, including subset and variant games. You can also type in a custom game ID manually.

Scraping & Library

• Improved scraping reliability overall
• Rescan specific platforms instead of your whole library
• Silk Pod now supports touch input
• Fixed permission issue that was clearing all media after applying images due to hitting the 128 URI permission cap
• Fixed rescanning with multiple ROM paths switching between folders instead of importing both

More Highlights

• Genre smart folders — auto-group games by genre from scraped metadata
• Regex smart folders — custom name patterns with built-in suggestions for popular series
• Animation Style settings — customise logo and background transition styles and animation speeds
• Default Sort — choose how games are ordered in new folders (A–Z, Recently Played, Most Played, Date Added)
• Smart Subfolders — platform smart folders can now show subfolders inside them
• ES-DE Integration — link your ES-DE folder for fallback game art and metadata
• Platform picker for shortcuts — assign a platform to app shortcuts for proper icon overlays and grouping
• Silk Pod has music packs (by @ Anti)
• Pause GIF Unless Selected option for animated icons
• Cocoon Keyboard has haptic and visual feedback
• Now Playing preview on the bottom screen
• Battery percentage toggle and accuracy fix
• Permission recovery — Cocoon detects cleared folder permissions and walks you through re-granting them
• Emulator crash recovery — graceful handling instead of getting stuck
• Start button now closes settings activities
• Faster theme loading on startup
• Optimised GIF & video playback
• Discord Rich Presence improvements across the board
• Settings reorganised with clear section headers
• **Bottom...

2.02 Update!

Heroes, logos, animations and customisation

You now have complete control over your animations under Settings -> Appearance -> Animation Style. Choose your style for both heros, logos and UI and choose from:

• Swipe
• Reverse Swipe
• Fade
• Zoom
• None

Also have fine control over the speed of all 3!

We've also greatly improved the animations as a whole - stopping things like duplicate logo animations and weird flickers.
We also fixed Vingette animations completely so you can enjoy animations with your Vingette hero mode!

Also, check out the Gradient Overlay in Settings -> Appearance -> Hero Settings. It will apply a nice black gradient between your hero and logo, making it easier to read

More Cheevo fixes!

We added better support for items such as .cso, .chd, .zip with gba, and much more!

Single Screen improvements

• Made the highlight selection scale properly.
• Capped the maximum zoom level to 3
• Made hero & logo animations work in Single Screen

List view improvements

You can now press L3 or pinch to zoom in List view to change the scale of the items, allowing for better readability or more items.

Smart folders (AGAIN!)

.m3u folders should now not create an auto subfolder in smart folders. You can also disable the Smart Subfolders features in Settings -> Library & Data to disable autocreating subfolders based on your directory setup (disabled by default)

ES-DE Integration aliases

We've added lots of new aliases to ES-DE to help link your data over. For example snesna will now map to snes. See the full list below

        "megadrive" to "genesis",
        "megadrivejp" to "genesis",
        "md" to "genesis",
        "megacd" to "segacd",
        "megacdjp" to "segacd",
        "mark3" to "mastersystem",
        "sms" to "mastersystem",
        "saturnjp" to "saturn",
        "sg1000" to "sg-1000",
        "pcengine" to "tg16",
        "pce" to "tg16",
        "pcenginecd" to "tg-cd",
        "pcecd" to "tg-cd",
        "tgcd" to "tg-cd",
        "sfc" to "snes",
        "snesna" to "snes",
        "sufami" to "snes",
        "famicom" to "nes",
        "n64dd" to "n64",
        "sgb" to "gb",
        "nswitch" to "switch",
        "gamecube" to "gc",
        "neogeocdjp" to "neogeocd",
        "fba" to "fbneo",
        "cps" to "cps1",
        "arcade" to "mame",
        "msx1" to "msx",
        "msx2" to "msx",
        "msxturbor" to "msx",
        "amiga1200" to "amiga",
        "amiga600" to "amiga",
        "amigacd32" to "amiga",
        "cd32" to "amiga",
        "cdtv" to "amiga",

if theres any more please let us know and we'll add it for the next update!

Other Changes

• Controller works to toggle battery percentage
• Alleviated power drainage in device sleep
• Improved discord authorisation
• Fixed single screen mode dock app launching

And if you want, you can support us at https://ko-fi.com/cocoonfe

Cocoon 2.01 is here!
We listened, here you go!

ES-DE LINK
A 0 wait experience that uses ESDE as the source for the art and metadata, meaning no copying, no waiting. Cocoon will use your ESDE folder directly, and any changes will be loaded as a priority from your Cocoon folder. This means you can enjoy a seamless and instant experience between the two with no overlap!

Audio Fixes
The audio is now completely tied to the top screen and is now much more stable. No more waking up in the middle of the night to Cocoon's (admittedly beautiful) Cocoon music... Wait... Why would you not want that?

'Start' button to open settings
You can now press the Start button to take you right to the settings if you're using a controller!

RetroAchievements hashing
You can now successfully hash your beautiful .RVZ and .CHD files for use with RetroAchievements!

Smart Folder Subfolders
Games in subfolders are now sorted automatically into smart folder subfolders. Organise away!
subfolders are also fully customisable with icons, folder colors, etc!

Sorting mode
Sort your folders and smart folders by A-Z, recently played, time played, or date added (you can also set a default in Settings -> Library & Data)

List view for folders
View your folders & smart folders in a list view for that classic frontend feel with a fresh coat of paint.

Better scrape config
You can now scrape specific platforms (or multiple) with a force all or missing data only option

Small Changes:
You can now toggle battery percentage under Settings -> Appearance
The clock now uses the devices 12/24hr format
Changed hero animation from slide -> fade

https://cocoon-shell.com/news/cocoon-2-0-release/

New Features

• Friends! Connect with Discord to set your activity and see other friends playing Cocoon from within the app!

How does friends work

Go to Settings -> General -> Show Rich Presence and enable it. Accept the Cocoon integration and boom!
Your rich presence will now reflect what game you're playing and the friends list will show you all your Discord
friends who are currently playing a game with Cocoon!

NOTE: THIS IS A NEW FEATURE! - Bugs and quirks are expected.

• Friends now playing notifications!
• Replaced Android Apps smart folder with app drawer (now in the dock). Apps can be added to the homescreen with Y/Hold + Create Shortcut
• Allowed for folder assets (icon, hero, logo)
• Icon roundness settings
• Full RetroAchievement support & compatibility
• Added info display for Android apps & cocoon settings/add folder
• m3u support. If you still have multiple ROMs already imported, simply rescan your library and they will fix!

General Fixes

• Folder popups now follow the theme
• Logos & assets standardized
• Replaced empty dock slot with subtle inner shadow
• Improved input handling for all dialogs across dual screen (achievements, etc)
• General stability
• Better UI consistency
• Fixed MP4 assets
• Fixed dock apps not launching on top screen when specified if launched from the bottom screen

Please make a database backup in Settings -> General -> Backup Database
I urge you to also reset App Data when transferring to the new version - games, folders and images will be brought along with the backup
NOTE: If you previously had RetroAchievements setup, please press the new Clear All Hashes feature and then Rescrape All Missing to generate new hashes that work for all platforms

Thank you all!

As always, if you wish to support the team, check out our Patreon at https://patreon.com/cw/cocoonfe
We will be introducing special tags for those who support us on friends lists soon as a thank you!

• Dark Mode + OLED mode + support for future themeing
• RetroAchievements
• Animated asset support
• Database backups & imports
• 1st wave of System Icons
• Swap screen animation
• UI polish & consistency
• Corner hints disable info corner too
• Added setting to disable rescrape on app launch
• added new folder colors - slate & sunflower
• new detailed view - shows recently earned achievements + dpi based
• database & image backup - making it easy to import/export your library!
• overall stability

• Added touch navigation to settings & context menus
• Users can long press icons to open the context menu
• Art now shows in offline mode
• First time setup makes the user setup a directory where images are stored to (this allows for reimporting of images across resets)
• Hero info mode - no hero, vingette (like 3ds banner), full hero
• Grid highlight no longer visible while navigating the dock
• Fixed highlight not updating in folders (needs more testing)
• Zoom level saves + seperate zoom level for folders
• Backdrop on context menu
• Logs are saved in Cocoon/logs (disabled by default as it takes power)
• Added reset app data button

• Major stability - no more emulators stopped working
• Fixed permission issues
• Grid resizing pinch gesture
• New settings page
• Disable dock / corner hints
• Sort games by MANUAL/ ALPHABETICAL / PLATFORM / LAST PLAYED
• Hash missing games persists
• Allow Android App icon changing
• Allow custom uploads for media
• Navigate to dock + Press Y to launch on top/bottom or change
• Icon art size works again
• Hash missing games setting persists
• Show battery percentage

BETA 1.3 - PLEASE UNINSTALL THE PREVIOUS VERSION IF YOU HAVE IT! IT CAN CAUSE ISSUES

• REWORKED ALOT OF THINGS THAT BROKE 1.2. SORRY!

• Lots of optimisations - bringing idle battery use from 5W -> 2W

• Grid doesnt load off screen - fixes issue of having 100+ games slowing down the app

• 3DS style reordering - Reordering now swaps items. Drag games onto manual folders to add them there. Drag folders onto games/folders to swap.

• Items dragged out of folders now don't get clipped by folder popup bounds - making it visually make sense

• GameGrid now has one source of truth - no desyncing

• Notifications if scraping is happening

• Screenscraper user login now works - I urge people to do this as the guest account has 20k max scrapes daily / 1 thread

• Restore bottom screen button for people not using Cocoon as the default launcher

• Custom wallpaper no longer flickers during navigation

• Custom wallpapers are never desynced

• Fixed default emulators not being saved

• Added support for Steam platform (uses Daijisho's format .steamappid)

• No more crashes or glitches when restarting device with Cocoon as default launcher