Backbone announced Backbone Pro, a next-generation controller engineered from the ground up to let players game on any screen with a single device.
The controller is a result of some intense engineering and market research, and it took more than three years to design and bring to the market, said Maneet Khaira, CEO of Backbone Labs, in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.
In fact, the Palo Alto, California-based company went through 9,000 prototypes and did 30 market research reports to figure out if it was on the right track to creating a breakthrough product, he said. To do that, Khaira had to build a team that all but worshipped the science and art of designing game controllers. They built a sequel to the Backbone One, launched in 2021.
Today, there are hundreds of millions of game controllers in the world, but they’re all designed to work primarily with a single console—and then slowly adapted to work elsewhere. That model hasn’t changed much, even as the way people play games has completely shifted, he said.
High-fidelity gaming on phones and cloud gaming—the ability to stream games from the cloud just like streaming music and TV—are growing fast, and more people are playing across platforms than ever before. Backbone Pro is designed for that world.
“We believe the future of gaming transcends individual devices,” said Khaira. “With Backbone Pro, you can experience the excitement and connection of gaming on any screen with just a single device.”
Backbone Pro offers two ways to play: handheld mode, where it’s physically connected to the device via USB-C for zero latency and no need to charge; and wireless mode, connecting via Bluetooth for gaming from a distance. It pairs instantly with phones, tablets (like iPad), laptops (including MacBooks), VR headsets (such as Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro), and smart TVs like Samsung Gaming Hub even without a console — and Backbone’s FlowState Technology in the Backbone app remembers previously paired devices and connects with a tap, ensuring ensuring frictionless device switching.
Designing Neji
The code name for the controller was Neji.
To make this work, Backbone had to rethink everything — from industrial design to firmware, Khaira said. The Backbone team, including engineers and researchers from Apple and Google, created the smallest form factor ever to accommodate full-size joysticks.
As mentioned, over the last few years, Backbone went through more than 9,000 part iterations and ran over 30 user research studies using a proprietary 3D camera system to measure hand movements and analyze thousands of hours of gameplay.
The result is what Khaira calls one of the most comfortable handheld gaming products ever built, with full-size joysticks, remappable back buttons, and a form factor that feels just right in users’ hands — whether they’re playing for 10 minutes or three hours, Khaira said.
Before launch, Backbone invited professional players and industry veterans to test and refine the product. The research shows that people perceive reduced latency when using a game controller versus other types of input.
Backbone Pro offers unprecedented levels of customization. Players can remap every button and create tailored control profiles for specific games and devices, saving different configurations for each platform they play on. The Backbone app serves as a central hub, allowing users to pair with new screens and customize their experience directly from handheld mode.
The Backbone app transforms your phone into a universal hub for gaming, allowing you to access all your games in one place. The app supports multiple gaming categories including App Store games (including Apple Arcade, Netflix games), Remote Play services (Xbox Remote Play, Steam Link), cloud gaming platforms (Nvidia GeForce NOW), and—for the first time—retro games through a built-in emulator. With new features like Smart Search, you can discover and launch games across platforms seamlessly, all from a single place. Subscribers to Backbone+ now also get access to a rotating library of free games that areinstantly playable seamlessly, along with enhanced features for Backbone Pro.
Backbone Pro is available now at backbone.com. Pricing will be announced shortly due to pending tariff decisions. Backbone Pro joins Backbone One as part of our growing controller lineup, giving players more ways to play across any screen.
Origins
Khaira founded the company in 2018, and its plan is to enable the future of gaming by allowing users to play any game, on any platform, on any screen, anywhere.
Founded in 2018, the company has developed hardware and software that create seamless gaming experiences regardless of platform. Backbone has partnered with PlayStation, Xbox, and collaborated with legendary game designer Hideo Kojima.
The tech started getting better and better so you could run a game like Grand Theft Auto on Android smartphones that were two generations old. Khaira played around with a prototype that an engineer built, he said, “And I completely lost my mind. We’ve seen disruptions in gaming across all these different verticals. But what occurred to me is that this is going to be one of the biggest disruptions in the history of the games industry, at least in my lifetime. Because it could fundamentally change how people play games and what devices they put them on.”
At Google, Khaira was part of the associate product manager program. In that role, Google took new graduates from college and trained them to be product managers inside the company. Khaira was working on YouTube, and he lived in San Francisco in a house with four friends. They played Fornite, as Epic Games had enabled the game to run at 60 frames per second on a smartphone. That was as much as twice the performance as other devices in the household.
“We’d basically all get back home from work every day, and we’d all play Fortnite on our phones, which sounds like a really dumb idea on your phone. We have all these tiny gaming PCs and consoles. The reason we did that is it was the first time we could all easily play the same game together,” Khaira said. “Even in 2025, if you want to play the same game, it requires quite a bit of activation energy. You have to own a console and a TV and all that stuff. But mobile phones are the lowest common denominator, so you can actually all play the same game.”
The friends were “totally floored and completely flabbergasted” to run that game at a high level of fidelity with a smartphone. But they saw the problems. Input on a smartphone without a video game controller was pretty tough.
“We were playing on a smartphone, and the game was designed to be played in a different way,” Khaira said.
As a gamer, I can relate to what Khaira and his friends went through. I used to play first-person shooter games like Doom and Quake with a mouse and keyboard. But when Microsoft’s Bungie launched the original Halo on the Xbox, I got used to play it with the old Duke controller. While I didn’t shoot as accurately or move my gunsight to a target as fast anymore, I could move and shoot at the same time, thanks to playing shooter games on a controller. With touchscreens on smartphones, the problem arose again, as it was hard to move you fingers accurately on a touchscreen without accidentally tapping the wrong part of the screen. So creating a controller that worked with the smartphone was key.
He added, “I got really excited about that, and I made a presentation internally on why I thought gaming was going to be like the single biggest opportunity, or one of the biggest opportunities for Google in the next decade because of streaming and Google Play.”
And he sent the deck around at YouTube and at Google. The next day, 1,000 people were reading the document. And it became a viral document at Google. So he went off to start Backbone Labs to make a universal game controller.
“I realized that there could be an opportunity to build something interesting, like the shifts that took place in streaming media that led to Roku and Netflix. The same might happen for game streaming as well, he thought. He wanted to create a single device that worked with Xbox, Apple, PlayStation, Android, GeForce Now, Roblox and more.
“Today, we make the only device and app that work across all those ecosystems, and so that kind of became the basis for the idea of the company,” Khaira said. “Every single major industry player was focused on bringing great games to mobile and more devices, but nobody was thinking about how to make the experience of playing all these games really fun. It was almost like a last-mile problem, if you will.”
Back in 2016, running a high-fidelity game on mobile was a single-digit percentage of Google Play revenue. But thanks to games like Genshin Impact, that is more than half of all mobile game revenue today, Khaira said. That’s pretty fast adoption.
The team got to work in 2018. Addressing the market need wasn’t easy, as resources were constrained. The original Backbone came out at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. We covered the launch, and gamers started talking about it and buying the first controller organically.
Backbone delivered on its promsied experience back in 2021, when the team launched its first game controller for a smartphone. It worked so well that mobile game makers (like the makers of Call of Duty: Mobile or Fortnite) began detecting game controllers on mobile phones and then grouped those players into higher-skilled, more accurate player groups.
Now the company’s 2021 version and a 2023 version are available in most major retailers including Best Buy, Target, Walmart, Apple retail stores, and others globally. The company was recently featured in Apple’s iPhone 16 announcement, and its app reached No. 4 in its category on the App Store this past holiday season.
The company never disclosed how much the original Backbone controller sold. But it is available in most retailer stores and the app was high ranked during the most recent holidays.
Backbone is backed by Index Ventures (early investors in Discord, Roblox, and Figma), Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, along with industry leaders like Jason Citron (former CEO, Discord), Chet Pipkin (founder, Belkin), Patrick Spence (former Sonos CEO), and Harpreet Rai (former Oura CEO)—plus cultural icons like Marshmello. Backbone’s team includes talent from Apple, Google, and Meta. They were all pretty patient.
The Backbone App
One of the keys to making games work with the controller is building the capability into the Backbone app.
“That’s what creates a seamless connection between your mind and the game,” Khaira said.
But without such a solution, players often felt like they were not playing on a dedicated gaming platform.
“That became the basis for the Backbone app, which is kind of this aggregator, where it takes all the games and services and puts them in one place so you can access them — like remote play, cloud gaming, Xbox, PlayStation or Steam all in like one place,” said Khaira.
The Backbone Pro
After a few years of research and development, the Backbone Pro started to surface. Apple showcased it with the iPhone 16 announcement in September, and now the company has partnered with PlayStation and Xbox.
“We’ve been continuing to grow the brand. And last holiday, our app was No. 4 in its category in the app store,” Khaira said. “That led to where we are today.”
Khaira had hired people who had worked on gaming products at Apple, Google and more. The team has over 50 people. Khaira believes that the best talent for designing controllers is in Silicon Valley, where hardware meets software.
“Basically, one of the biggest things about building game controllers is that it’s really, really hard. Microsoft invested $100 million in R&D on the Xbox One controller. There’s articles online talking about that. The reason is you have to get the ergonomics and the hand feeling like right, because gamers really care about that stuff,” Khaira said.
He added, “It has to work from the fifth percentile hand size to the 95th percentile hand size. Our view is that it is critical to build this competency in house. Because our view is that today, if you believe that gaming will increasingly move to streaming, and if you believe that the games you can play, even on low-end devices like phones will get better, then you’re going to be able to run games on any screen in the future.”
He continued, “And if you can run games on any screen, you’re going to need something to control all those screens. And so we think gamers are going to actually identify more with the game controller than the console in the future, because that’s what you’re going to need to play on all these different devices. And that’s the thing that you’re going to bring with you more often than not.”
But most game controllers have been designed to work with a single console, and they don’t work so well when you try to use the same designs on different devices. That’s because game console companies really want to sell their own controllers to go with their game consoles.
The Steam Deck acknowledges the value of controllers, but it also has a built-in screen. That makes the controller into part of the Steam Deck.
The Backbone Pro is lighter, weighing just 199 games. It’s 100 grams lighter than a Steam Deck.
“If you look at like console and PC today, gamers have the option to play with the controller or with a mouse and keyboard. There’s no reason why mobile shouldn’t be any different from that,” Khaira said. “And if there are concerns about fairness, games like Call of Duty: Mobile will pair you with people who have similar input.”
“That said, having a Backbone regular or Backbone Pro puts you at a significant gameplay advantage over people playing with touchscreen because you are much more effective,” Khaira said.
Hundreds and hundreds of prototypes
The first Backbone controller was limited to a certain number of iterations of prototypes because each one took one or two weeks to create. That meant no more than perhaps 40 iterations a year. But now the company has made advances in 3D printing and it can do multiple iterations in a week.
“You can have 100 times the development velocity,” he said. “We took this culture of high velocity, and we married that with the high accountability culture you see at a place like Apple. We hired engineers from the discipline. We would capture thousands of hours of gameplay footage using these 360-degree cameras. They measured joint angles of the hand during natural gameplay.
“The reason we have to do so many iterations is to get the ergonomics and the hand feeling to be accurate and comfortable,” said Khaira.
They came up with two modes. The handheld mode is when the phone is connected to the controller physically. And then wireless mode is where the connection is via Bluetooth. That’s a lot more comfortable, but it is tough on battery life. The Backbone Pro wound up with 40 hours of battery life, with about the same range as a Sony DualSense or Xbox controller.
“When we started thinking about Backbone Pro, the first thing we did was we wanted to understand our currently shipping product and what was going well and what could be improved on there. So we started by benchmarking against ourselves, doing lots of user research to understand our current experience,” Khaira said. “When we decided we wanted to build the Backbone Pro we started with, ‘What is comfort for everyone?’”
That started to play with moldable clay and brought in users with hands of all sizes. For each prototype, they did a 3D print job.They would change the specs by a millimeter or half a millimeter and test them. When they weren’t happy with a design, they would go back and start over. They did that for months before they started tooling any plastic or metal tools.
“Once you start cutting metal tools and shooting plastic, it becomes much more expensive,” he said. “The time between builds is much longer, so that, in the spirit of learning and failing fast and learning as quickly as possible, we did as much low fidelity with the 3D prints as possible,” he said.
They would bring in 50 or 60 people over a weekend and they would play together. They would capture every play session with cameras. They tested close to 100 different textures and looked at things like the ideal distance between buttons.
Backbone did an updated version of the controller in 2023. But the Pro was in the works on and off for about four years.
The designers wanted to take the best ergonomics and compress them into the smallest package possible. In one design Khaira showed me, the thumb stick was full sized, but overall dimensions were constrained. To fix it, the team had to shave 25 microns in 10 different locations. About 250 microns is about the thickness of a human hair.
“The amount of engineering that went into compressing the form factor down was quite significant,” Khaira said. “The effectiveness ratings were really high.”
I held the Backbone Pro in my hands and it was comfortable. I played a version of Forza, a racing game, and it was easy to drive as the controller was connected via Bluetooth to a TV display showing the racing game. It felt like I was playing a console game. The app tells you if the controller works with your game or your smartphone. And as Apple changed its policies around the App Store to allow for game emulation, Backbone Labs studied emulator apps and allowed for emulators to work properly with the Pro.
Based on the design experience, Khaira said the user experience matters just as much as the engineering. Quite often, gamers stumble over poor designs by hitting buttons, paddles or bumpers accidentally — sometimes as much as 50% of the time. Backbone Labs measured this and tried to keep it down. Some companies deliberately do not map a paddle to a function by default, in case they are pressed accidentally. But you can configure these paddles if you want to do so.
“It’s really a sweet spot where you have to fine tune it,” he said.
Backbone also has a featured dubbed parallel charging, where a device can be charged while it’s being used. Then it seems like you never run out of battery life when it is hooked in via a cable.
The controller is also customizable so that it cane be more accessible to a variety of players, including some who have limited mobility.
“This could be just one device that you can access to play on every screen. And that’s where we think really the future is going to go,” said Khaira. “That’s the overall overview of Neji as a platform,” he said.
