Mobile: The Next Chapter for Decentraland
By DCL Regenesis Labs, , in Announcements
For years, Decentraland has been experienced on desktop. In its early days through a web browser, and later using the downloadable desktop client. In 2026, that’s about to change.
Mobile is where people spend their time, keep up with friends, and discover communities and great content. It’s also where the next wave of users already is. By late 2025, the number of unique mobile users reached 5.78 billion, about 70% of the world’s population (DataReportal).
If Decentraland is going to be a social virtual place you can return to, something you can drop into anytime, anywhere, it needs to live on the device you always have with you.
This update shares why mobile is now a priority, what’s already working, what ships next, and how we’re thinking about 2026.
Why Mobile, Why Now
We’re building mobile for one reason: distribution. Mobile is the world’s default computer.
People already live there. On average, internet users spend 3 hours and 46 minutes per day using their mobile devices (DataReportal). That is where attention is, and relationships happen.
Our focus is on mobile social places, spaces where the activity (sometimes games, other times, parties or movie nights) is often just the excuse to meet up. You come for a few minutes. You stay because your friends are there. You return because the world keeps moving.
That’s the Decentraland we’re building toward: social-first, easy to re-enter, and available everywhere.
What We’re Building
We’re building a fully featured, standalone Decentraland mobile client that makes it easy to stay connected to what’s happening in the world, whether that’s joining friends, checking in on an event, or exploring a place that’s already active.
The goal is simple: make Decentraland a place you can access throughout your day. That includes people discovering Decentraland on mobile first, and existing users who want to stay connected with a low barrier of entry.
Building this on mobile comes with real constraints, and we’re treating them as product inputs.
Decentraland is creator-driven. Content varies widely in complexity. Mobile hardware varies widely too. The challenge is delivering a world that feels smooth and responsive across all of it. If the experience lags or breaks, the spell is gone, so stability and performance are core to what we are building.
We’re also building on an open stack. The mobile client is being developed in Godot, an open-source game engine. That matters because Decentraland isn’t just a single app, it’s a protocol. Different clients can access the same world across platforms, and mobile is one more entry point into that shared space.
Finally, mobile distribution comes with platform realities. App store policies introduce requirements around privacy, data handling, UX conventions, and content rules. We are designing within those constraints from day one so the product can scale, without compromising the openness and permissionless building that makes Decentraland what it is.
Where We Are Today
We’ve moved beyond an experimental prototype and into active product development, with a clear path to a public release.
In 2026 we started organizing weekly Community Playtests. We’ve already held four playtests, gathered direct feedback, and folded it into new builds as we iterate in public.
Even though the iOS and Android builds are not officially supported, mobile is already showing pull. There are no redirects from Decentraland web properties, no public iOS App Store listing, and no indexing across official social profiles. And yet, mobile users already account for 15 percent of weekly active users.
Along the way, we’ve shipped meaningful user-facing improvements, including HUD updates, video player support, and graphics enhancements, as we tighten the core experience and push toward release.
A snapshot of the mobile client as of January
https://www.youtube.com/embed/RXwmDHLbuQM?si=FoFRm86pRO7l_dZZ
https://www.youtube.com/embed/n_nvbeIhGdk?si=JU2Dj3jo8LLB2Hq3
Unmodified in-game footage - iPhone 16E, High Graphics @ 4x Anti-Aliasing.
The 2026 Roadmap
We’re organizing 2026 around a simple sequence: ship the foundations first (performant scene rendering, social features, high quality UX), then ship the reasons to return.
Milestone 1 V1 (Q1 2026) is the first release we’re comfortable putting in front of a broader audience. The focus is the core mobile experience: discoverability, clean navigation, fast re-entry, and the social basics that make Decentraland feel like a place with people in it. Expect chat, friends, events, Emotes, and notifications, paired with the everyday surfaces that make the app usable—Profile, Backpack, and the Discovery page, HUD and in-world notifications, deeplinks, settings, and video/livestream support.
Milestone 2 V2 (Q2 2026) is where we aim to feel feature-complete and significantly more performance-stable, closer to parity with today’s reference desktop explorer. Social becomes richer with Communities, direct messages, and voice chat. Decentraland becomes more mobile-native with a “social portrait” experience (access key social systems without needing to be in-world), plus stronger onboarding, push notifications, in-world camera, quests, and more.
Under the hood, Milestone 2 is also where we invest deeper in mobile performance: a mobile custom shader and changes to rendering logic designed to reduce GPU load, broaden device support over time, and support longer sessions across more devices.
In H2 2026, the focus shifts to engagement. We’ll prioritize mobile-first, replayable social experiences—short sessions that are better with other people, and built around easy re-entry. These experiences are designed around shared moments, simple structures, and clear reasons to come back together. We’ll build them alongside the community through game jams and hackathons focused on formats that work well on mobile devices.
Stay Tuned
If you haven’t checked in on Decentraland lately, mobile is the comeback.
We’ll keep sharing progress as we approach the March release, keep playtesting with the community, and keep building in the open.
Interested to join the Community Playtests? Join here:
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The March 2026 update has just been rolled out, check out what's in the latest release.