About

Pocket Pinball is made by Retro Eki, a small independent studio building apps for people who grew up with these machines and never really left them.

It started as a feature, not an app

Retro Eki’s first app was a front end for Android. One place to hold your whole retro collection: point it at your folders, let it scan, watch the cover art fill itself in, then tap a game and land straight in the right emulator. No menus to dig through.

Visual Pinball X went on that list as one more thing we supported, with tables playing natively rather than through a separate emulator. It refused to behave like the others. A pinball table is not a ROM. It arrives as a .vpx file that might also want a ROM, a backglass, a PuP pack, a FlexDMD folder or a stack of music, every piece filed in the right place before a single ball drops. It needed its own library, its own file handling, its own controls and its own screen.

So we split it out. Pocket Pinball is that library, grown up and given an app of its own.

What it does

Pocket Pinball plays real Visual Pinball X tables on your phone, using the same open source VPX engine as the desktop version and the same .vpx files. Point it at a folder on internal storage or an SD card and your collection appears with cover art and metadata. Touch flippers, plunger and nudge are built for a phone held in portrait, and every control maps to a gamepad if you would rather use one. Companion files get filed for you. Scores go to a shared leaderboard.

It is free, it carries no ads, and it runs on Android 13 and above on 64 bit devices.

What it is not

Pocket Pinball is a player. It ships with no tables and no ROMs, and it never will. Tables are built by the virtual pinball community and you bring your own, along with any ROM a recreation needs. For legal reasons we do not provide ROM files, and we do not link to them.

We are not affiliated with the Visual Pinball X project, and not endorsed by it. VPX is an independent open source effort by a lot of people who owe us nothing, and the tables you play are the work of authors who built them for the love of it. We are grateful to all of them.

The people using it

More than 250 people are in the Pocket Pinball Discord, and it keeps growing. It is where bug reports land, where tables get recommended, and where most of what ends up in the app gets argued about first.

The table catalogue on this site runs to more than 2,000 machines, from 1930s wood rails to originals built last year.

Come and say hello on Discord, or start at Cadet and get your first table running.

Check out the Guides and Tables

https://pocketpinball.com/tables

https://pocketpinball.com/guides/