Cannoli Brings the Magic of MinUI to Android
Sometimes simple is better, and Cannoli certainly gets the job done.
Any retro handheld can be a lot to handle. If I gave you a box with 1,000 video games on it, and told you to pick the one you wanted to play today, how long would it take you? A minute? Five? The truth is that it usually takes a person way longer than they’d even like in order to just choose the game they’re going to play, when you’re given a million bells and whistles to distract you. This issue plagued many users of the lower-spec Linux-based retro handhelds until MinUI came onto the scene.
Offering users the strange concept of less choices rather than more, MinUI aims to solve the executive dysfunction of retro handhelds by intentional limitation. Showing users only consoles and games, and forgoing every other feature (even Wi-Fi!) so that superfluous things like achivements and boxart have no place in the mind of the player. It is kind of a genius solution, and pretty indicative of the current era of tech frustration that we all live in.
Admittedly, I was not one of the early adopters of MinUI, nor did I get much into its forks, including NextUI and PakUI. For me, the lower-end a device is, the more I tend to want to get out of it. I gravitated toward more full-featured offerings for those devices that offered it, and it actually wasn’t until Cannoli that I came to really appreciate the design philosophies of MinUI.
Cannoli’s default menu. (Device: Anbernic RG Rotate)
Cannoli is developed by Brandon Kowalski, or K-Wall, and seeks to invoke the same manner of intentional limitations (referred to as ‘unapologetically opinionated’ by the developer) of MinUI. It handles things quite a bit differently, since it’s a frontend for Android and not an entire UI wrapper in and of itself, but the effect is roughly the same in practice. After a little bit of tinkering, and a good amount of Italian slang, it presents you with an almost-familiar menu for users of MinUI and its forks.
There’s not too much to be said of Cannoli other than that it is amazing at what it does. It gives you a flat black menu with white text and dares you to play games, both through its bundled cores and through standalone emulators. There are no touch controls, no notifications, and no animations of any kind. Pretty much any emulator you can think of is supported, so the experience isn’t limited to older-gen emulation: on my AYANEO Pocket DMG, I even launch Nintendo Switch games through Eden Nightly, seamlessly from the Cannoli main menu.
One of the greatest features of base Cannoli is the addition of a Five Game Handheld (5GH) mode, which roughly mimics the functionality outlined by the Retro Game Corps MinUI Starter Guide. Essentially, this does away with even the ability to select a console, showing you exactly five games to choose from on the front menu, and nothing else. When you’re trying to cut through the noise and just pick a game, it’s undeniable how insanely easy this mode makes things.
The Five Game Handheld settings menu. (Device: AYANEO Pocket DMG)
There are other features here not present in MinUI that are worth noting: Nonna’s Kitchen is a web UI to handle file management, and all of the emulators can be configured in sub-menus that are unique to Cannoli. The interface is tight and not busy at all, and I’ve found it really feels at home on square or near-square aspect ratios, which is why I’ve showcased it with the Pocket DMG and RG Rotate. It really feels like a natural part of the device itself, hardly even a frontend; and that makes it that much easier to use.
K-Wall is incredibly open to conversation in his Discord server, where he shares updates and progress reports on Cannoli’s development. I’ve been following the project since one of its first releases, and its come so far in that time that it really feels like a complete product now. I had some reservations at first regarding its use of generative AI, but any generated assets were replaced pretty quickly.
I’ve linked Cannoli’s website below, and also included a link to K-Wall’s Ko-fi. He’s put some hard work into this project, and its really revolutionized the simplistic side of Android. Even though I tend to use more full-featured frontends, sometimes I find myself drawn back to Cannoli just because of how stupid simple it is.
If you’d like me to review a product, email me: me@jaw.fyi