On a device with one screen the companion is a panel beside the game: press BACK to slide it in over the game, tap the padlock on its edge to lock it beside the game (the game moves over), and drag that tab sideways to resize it. BACK closes an unlocked panel; hold BACK to leave the game.

Hold a phone upright and the game sits across the top with the companion docked under it. Drag the grip on the companion's top edge to pick its height, or tap the grip to step through small, normal and full. Without a controller, the touch controls fill the space between the game and the companion.

PokeDaisy checks for a new version each time you open it and offers to install it. You can also check from Settings > VERSION.

The app's own text comes in English, Japanese, French, German, Italian and Spanish. By default it follows the ROM's language (the device's in the Library); pick another under LANGUAGE in either Settings screen. Pokémon, move and item names and the GUIDE pages stay as the game has them.

• Fast-forward with a speed cap, plus slow motion. Smart fast-forward drops to normal speed in menus and on the map, and keeps battles fast.
• Fast-forward music (alpha) that keeps playing the song at its normal speed, instead of chipmunk sound.
• Save states on hotkeys, with undo.
• Status bar (optional): game, location, money, clock and battery above the game.
• Aspect: the GBA's own 3:2, or stretched to fill a 16:9 top screen (Settings shows a preview of both).
• Shaders (optional): an LCD grid (plain or on paper), scanlines or a CRT look, and the colours as the GBA's own screen showed them - on the game and, if you like, the companion screen too.
• Controls: remap every GBA button and hotkey, or turn hotkeys off. X and Y are a second START and SELECT, like the menu and registered-item buttons in the DS games. On-screen touch controls appear when no controller is connected, and hide once a controller is used. Bluetooth and USB controllers (8BitDo, GameSir, Xbox, ...) connect while a game is running without restarting it, and HOME / guide works like a BACK tap for the companion.
• Themes: PokéDaisy (the default, the website's light backdrop with floating logos) or one of eight game-coloured ones (FireRed, LeafGreen, Emerald, ...) for the library and settings, in Settings > THEME.

• List or grid view, recently played, and cover art from SteamGridDB or RetroAchievements box art (or pick your own image).
• ROMs can be plain .gba files or zipped (.zip / .7z), in your ROMs folder or imported with +.
• Refresh rescans your ROMs folder and tells you what it found.
• Long-press a game to:
  • Rename or hide it.
  • Load a save file into it (your current save is kept as a dated backup).
  • See its info: ROM, save file and save states.
• Works with frontends like ES-DE, Cocoon and iiSU. They can launch a game straight into PokeDaisy. Setup guides for iiSU and ES-DE; the technical details are for other frontends.

Saves are standard .sav / .srm files, the same format as mGBA and RetroArch, so you can move them between emulators freely. A game finds its save by the ROM's file name (for a zipped game, the name of the ROM inside the archive, as in RetroArch).

Game Boy / Color games play too; Pokémon Yellow is the first one the companion reads, in the game's own look (its font, icons and town map, rebuilt from your ROM). R.O.W.E. plays, but its companion is still in progress. Map ◐ means place names only, without the map picture. Battle ◐ means the battle panes work but haven't been checked in every kind of battle. The guides were written from each game's own data and may contain mistakes; the app says so the first time you open one.

This project may use AI-assisted development tools, such as Claude Code, to help with code generation, refactoring, and documentation. All changes are still reviewed by the maintainer and validated with the project's existing checks before release.

• mGBA by Vicki Pfau (endrift) and contributors runs the games (MPL 2.0; source in third_party/mgba), with its bundled blip_buf (LGPL 2.1) and inih (BSD).
• rcheevos by RetroAchievements.org (MIT) for achievements.
• Pixel Operator font by Jayvee Enaguas (CC0).
• PixelMplus (M+ FONT LICENSE, M+ FONTS PROJECT) for Japanese text, converted to Pixel Operator's pixel grid by scripts/gen_jp_font.py.
• The pret decompilation projects and pokeemerald-expansion, which the game data and guides were checked against.
• PokeAPI (BSD 3-Clause) for the National Dex species list.
• AndroidX, Jetpack Compose, Kotlin and Apache Commons Compress (Apache 2.0), XZ for Java (0BSD).

Every license is in NOTICE and, in the app, under Settings > LICENSES.

• Cover art from SteamGridDB and its contributors, and box art from RetroAchievements.