Three companion apps sit on most gamers’ phones right now, and only one of them is pulling numbers that would embarrass the other two. The Xbox app holds a 4.7-star rating from 1.7 million reviews on the Apple App Store, while the PlayStation App sits at 4.2 stars on iOS and a rougher 3.5 stars on Android from 1.1 million reviews. Nintendo’s Switch Online app trails the pack at 3.1 stars on iOS from 13,000 ratings. That is not a rounding error. That is a full 1.6-star gap between the best-reviewed console companion app and the worst, and it maps almost exactly onto what each app actually lets you do from a phone screen.
This comparison breaks down the PlayStation App, the Xbox app, and the Nintendo Switch Online app across ratings, remote purchases, party chat, trophy and achievement tracking, screenshot sharing, remote play, and the subscription strings attached to each one. It also covers what changed in 2026, including a PlayStation App update that briefly cratered to a 1.06-star rating during a user revolt over physical media, and a Nintendo app that finally learned to show you which friends are online.
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What Each Companion App Actually Does
All three apps promise the same basic pitch: manage your gaming life without turning on the console. The execution diverges sharply. The PlayStation App lets you browse the PlayStation Store, queue remote downloads to a PS5 sitting at home, check trophies, message friends, and get push notifications when a party invite lands. What it does not do is stream your console to the phone screen, because Sony splits that job off into a separate PS Remote Play app rather than folding it into the main one.
The Xbox app takes the opposite approach and bundles nearly everything into a single install. Remote purchases, remote installs, party and voice chat, achievement tracking with running Gamerscore totals, game clip and screenshot sharing, and a personalized activity feed all live under one roof. Microsoft’s 2026 competitive intelligence reporting pegs the app at a 4.6-out-of-5 aggregate rating across 3.9 million reviews, and while some of that reception is described as polarized among power users, the raw score still clears both rivals by a wide margin.
Nintendo’s Switch Online app is the outlier by design rather than accident. It exists mainly to provide voice chat for online play in supported titles like Splatoon 3 and to show a friend list, and historically it has not offered a system-wide messaging inbox or trophy-style progress tracking the way Sony and Microsoft’s subscription ecosystems do. A 2025-era update finally let users see which friends were online, a feature IGN covered as a long-overdue basic addition rather than a headline feature, and independent reviewers at outlets like XDA Developers have reached the same conclusion when stacking all three apps side by side: Nintendo’s app remains the one most players need least.
The history behind each app explains some of the current gap. Sony’s PlayStation App descends from a lineage of second-screen tools going back to the PS Vita era, and it absorbed features gradually as Sony consolidated separate messaging and store apps into one install over several console generations. Microsoft took a more aggressive unify-everything approach starting with the Xbox One era, treating the mobile app as a genuine extension of the console dashboard rather than a lightweight companion, which is part of why remote install and party chat feel native rather than bolted on. Nintendo, by contrast, built its app almost as an afterthought to solve one specific problem, the lack of built-in voice chat hardware on Switch consoles, and has never significantly expanded its scope since.
Full Feature Comparison Table
| Feature | PlayStation App | Xbox App | Switch Online App |
|---|---|---|---|
| iOS App Store rating | 4.2★ (91K ratings) | 4.7★ (1.7M ratings) | 3.1★ (13K ratings) |
| Google Play rating | 3.5★ (1.1M reviews) | 4.5★ (~2.3M reviews) | 3.8–3.9★ (~74–77K reviews) |
| Remote game purchases | Yes, via PS Store | Yes, via Microsoft Store | No |
| Remote install to console | Yes (queue download) | Yes (direct remote install) | Not applicable |
| Party or voice chat | Join parties from app | Full party chat in-app | Voice chat, tied to NSO membership |
| Trophy/achievement tracking | Full trophy list, rarity %, tiers | Achievements + Gamerscore total | None |
| Screenshot/clip sharing | Yes | Yes, plus game clips | Screenshot sharing only |
| Remote play/streaming | Separate PS Remote Play app | Cloud gaming access built in | Not offered |
| Push notifications | Yes | Yes | Yes, limited |
| Friends list | Full list + messaging | Full list + messaging | List added; messaging limited |
| Core features gated by paid sub | Mostly no (online play needs PS Plus) | Mostly no (online play needs Game Pass Core+) | Yes, most features need NSO |
| Platform availability | iOS, Android | iOS, Android | iOS, Android |
App Store and Google Play Ratings: The Real Numbers
Ratings tell a consistent story once you pull them from more than one storefront. On Google Play, the Xbox app carries roughly a 4.5-star average across about 2.3 million reviews, with 2026 benchmarking sites measuring it closer to 4.52 stars. That is the highest score of the three apps on the platform where the sample size is largest, and it holds up against Apple’s numbers too, where a 2026 aggregate reading put the app at 4.6 stars from 2.9 million total ratings worldwide.
The PlayStation App on Google Play lands at 3.5 stars from 1.1 million reviews, with a localized listing showing 3.4 stars from 1.03 million reviews, a gap Google attributes partly to its device-type-aware rating system that now separates phone scores from tablet and foldable scores. Curiously, a third-party Android distribution channel, Uptodown, shows version 26.7.0 of the same app at 4.4 stars with 9.7 million downloads logged, a reminder that official storefront scores and raw download volume do not always move together.
The Nintendo Switch Online app sits furthest behind on both stores. Google Play shows 3.8 to 3.9 stars from around 74,000 to 77,000 reviews depending on the region listing, while the iOS App Store page, last updated in September 2026, shows just 3.1 stars from 13,000 ratings. Nintendo’s review count is an order of magnitude smaller than either rival’s, which partly reflects a smaller pool of users who need the app at all, since most core Switch functions still happen on the console itself.
Benchmarking Reliability Across Three Independent Sources
Star ratings only tell part of the story, so it helps to triangulate across independent measurement points rather than trusting a single storefront number. The first data point is the official app store listings themselves, which show Xbox leading on both iOS and Android by a wide margin over PlayStation and an even wider one over Nintendo. The second data point comes from third-party distribution and analytics trackers like Uptodown, which logged the PlayStation App’s Android build at a notably higher 4.4 stars with 9.7 million downloads, a figure that diverges from the official Play Store number enough to suggest rating volatility tied to specific update cycles rather than a stable long-term score.
The third data point is sentiment and competitive-intelligence reporting from 2026, which independently pegged the Xbox app at a 4.6 aggregate rating from 3.9 million reviews while flagging the same app’s reception as polarized among a subset of power users despite the high headline number. Cross-referencing all three sources points to the same ranking order every time: Xbox app first, PlayStation App second, Nintendo Switch Online app third, with the size of the gap between first and second narrower than the gap between second and third. That consistency across independently collected data sets is a stronger signal than any single rating snapshot on its own.
Notification reliability is worth a separate mention, since a companion app is only as useful as the alerts it actually delivers. Coverage of PlayStation Network’s six separate outages between March and mid-2026 noted that when PSN itself goes down, the PlayStation App’s messaging and party features go down with it, since the app depends entirely on Sony’s backend rather than working offline. Xbox and Nintendo have not shown a comparable pattern of repeated, unacknowledged multi-incident outages over the same stretch, which indirectly favors the reliability of notifications delivered through their respective apps even though neither company publishes app-specific uptime figures.
Privacy and Permissions: What Each App Asks For
Installing any of these three apps means granting a similar baseline set of permissions, though the exact scope differs. All three request push notification access immediately on first launch, since alerts for messages, friend requests, and party invites are core to what each app does. Camera access shows up in all three as well, most visibly in the Nintendo Switch Online app, which uses the camera to scan a QR code during the console-linking step, and in the PlayStation and Xbox apps for scanning similar pairing codes or capturing profile photos.
Background app refresh is where the apps diverge most in practice. The Xbox app leans on background activity more heavily to keep remote install status and party chat presence current in real time, which some users cite as a factor in slightly higher battery usage compared to the other two. The PlayStation App requests similar background permissions for trophy sync and download queuing but tends to check in less frequently. Nintendo’s app requests the smallest permission footprint of the three, consistent with its narrower feature set, asking mainly for notifications, camera access for account linking, and microphone access strictly limited to the voice chat feature inside supported games.
Remote Purchases and Installs: Buying a Game From the Couch
This is where the Nintendo app opts out entirely. The PlayStation App and Xbox app both let a user browse the full digital storefront, buy a game or add-on, and queue it to download on a console sitting at home, even if that console is powered off in rest mode. The PlayStation App has supported this workflow for years and pairs it with trophy syncing so a purchased game shows up ready to launch by the time someone walks in the door.
Microsoft’s app does the same job with one meaningful difference: it also handles direct remote installs rather than just queuing a store purchase, and 2026 competitive intelligence summaries specifically flag remote install and party chat as the two features driving engagement. Neither app currently offers this for Nintendo hardware. The Switch Online app has no storefront browsing, no remote purchase flow, and no way to push a download to a docked Switch 2 from outside the house, which keeps it firmly in the voice-chat-and-friends-list lane rather than the full companion category Sony and Microsoft compete in.
Party Chat, Voice Chat, and Social Features
Xbox built its social layer around messaging and party chat first, and the mobile app inherits that structure directly, letting a user join a party, text a friend, or browse a personalized activity feed without touching a controller. The PlayStation App supports joining parties and direct messaging too, though the underlying party infrastructure still depends on the PS Plus status attached to the account rather than anything the app itself unlocks.
Nintendo’s approach remains the most tightly scoped of the three, and Nintendo’s own Switch Online overview page frames the app primarily as a voice chat companion rather than a full social hub. Voice chat in the Switch Online app only activates for supported titles, Splatoon 3 being the flagship example, and it functions as a workaround for the fact that the Switch 2 hardware itself has no built-in party chat system the way PS5 and Xbox Series X do. That makes the app less a general social hub and more a single-purpose utility bolted onto specific games, which is part of why reliability comparisons between the three platforms rarely even mention Nintendo’s app in the same breath.
Trophies vs Achievements vs Nothing: Tracking Progress
PlayStation’s trophy system remains the most detailed of the three inside its companion app. Every game shows a trophy list broken down by bronze, silver, gold, and platinum tiers, complete with a global rarity percentage for each one, letting a player see exactly how uncommon a given trophy is before deciding whether to chase it. That same data syncs the moment a trophy pops on console, so a phone check mid-commute reflects real-time progress.
Xbox mirrors this with achievements and a running Gamerscore total visible on the profile screen, and 2026 sentiment reporting on the app calls out achievement tracking as one of its core engagement drivers alongside remote install. Nintendo has no equivalent system at all. There is no platform-wide trophy or achievement layer on Switch or Switch 2, so the companion app has nothing comparable to surface, which is one of the clearer feature gaps separating Nintendo’s ecosystem from Sony and Microsoft’s.
Screenshot and Clip Sharing
All three apps handle screenshots, though depth varies. The PlayStation App pulls captures taken on console and lets a user share them straight to social platforms or save them to a phone’s camera roll. Xbox goes further by also surfacing short game clips, not just static screenshots, and folding them into the same activity feed used for achievements and friend updates, so a highlight moment and a Gamerscore milestone can sit side by side.
Nintendo’s Switch Online app supports screenshot sharing pulled from the console or handheld, and that has long been one of its more reliably praised features even in otherwise lukewarm reviews. It does not extend to video clips in the same integrated way Xbox offers, and there is no equivalent activity feed tying captures to friend activity or progress tracking, which keeps the feature useful but narrow.
Remote Play and Cloud Streaming: What Lives in the Main App
Sony splits remote play out of the main PlayStation App entirely. Streaming a PS5 to a phone requires downloading the separate PS Remote Play app, a decision that keeps the primary app lighter but adds friction for anyone who assumes one PlayStation app should do everything. Xbox folds cloud gaming access directly into its main app for Ultimate subscribers, letting a user launch a supported title through Xbox Cloud Gaming without installing anything additional, which is a meaningful convenience win baked into the same install that handles purchases and party chat.
Nintendo offers no remote play or cloud streaming option through its companion app or anywhere else in its ecosystem. That gap is consistent with Nintendo’s broader hardware philosophy, since the Switch 2 is already a portable device by design, reducing the pressure to build a phone-streaming layer on top of a console that already travels. Still, for households juggling multiple platforms, it means the Switch Online app cannot compete on this axis at all.
Pricing: What Powers Each App’s Core Features
None of the three apps charge a separate fee to download, but each one leans on a console-side subscription to unlock its most useful functions, and those subscriptions are priced very differently as of September 2026.
| Subscription | Monthly | Annual | What it unlocks in-app |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nintendo Switch Online (Individual) | N/A | $19.99/year | Voice chat, online lobbies, cloud saves |
| Nintendo Switch Online (Family, 8 accounts) | N/A | $34.99/year | Same features across household |
| NSO + Expansion Pack (Individual) | N/A | $49.99/year | Adds retro game libraries, DLC access |
| NSO + Expansion Pack (Family) | N/A | $79.99/year | Household-wide expanded library |
| PlayStation Plus Essential | $10.99 | $79.99/year | Online multiplayer, party features |
| PlayStation Plus Extra | $16.99 | $134.99/year | Adds game catalog access |
| PlayStation Plus Premium | $19.99 | $159.99/year | Adds cloud streaming, classics catalog |
| Xbox Game Pass Core | ~$9.99 | No annual plan | Online multiplayer access |
| PC Game Pass | ~$13.99 | No annual plan | PC library, no console multiplayer |
| Xbox Game Pass Ultimate | $22.99 | No annual plan | Cloud gaming in-app, full library, day-one titles |
Nintendo’s pricing looks like the outright bargain on paper at $19.99 a year for the base tier, and it is, but that low number buys the least functional app of the three. Sony and Microsoft charge considerably more per year for their top tiers, and both of those higher price points come bundled with companion apps that do noticeably more. Anyone comparing raw subscription cost without factoring in app capability is only getting half the picture, a point covered in more detail in the full three-way subscription price breakdown.
2026 Redesigns, Updates, and Controversies
The PlayStation App had the roughest year of the three. In July 2026, version 26.6.1 became a lightning rod when its release coincided with Sony’s broader retreat from physical media support, and sentiment-tracking data showed the app’s rating for that specific version collapse from 2.25 stars down to 1.06 stars almost overnight. The backlash targeted Sony’s policy decisions rather than any actual bug in the update, but the app absorbed the damage anyway because it was the most visible surface for users to register a complaint.
Xbox had a quieter year by comparison, with its desktop counterpart getting a unified library update that merged Steam and Epic Games Store titles into one view, a change that did not touch the mobile app directly but signaled Microsoft’s continued push toward a single front door for a player’s entire library regardless of platform. Nintendo’s most notable 2026 change was smaller in scope but symbolically important: the app finally started showing which friends were online, a feature both PlayStation and Xbox have offered for well over a decade.
Nintendo’s app also saw a download surge tied to Switch 2 hardware momentum rather than any feature change, briefly climbing into the top 20 Entertainment category apps in the US as new console owners installed it to set up online play for the first time. That spike says more about hardware sales than app quality, but it did put more eyes on an app that had previously flown under the radar.
Onboarding and First-Time User Experience
First launches set the tone for how much a new user trusts an app, and the three diverge here almost as much as they do everywhere else. The Xbox app walks a new user through account sign-in, console linking, and notification permissions in a single guided flow that typically takes under two minutes, then drops the user directly into a personalized activity feed already populated with recent achievements and friend activity if the account has console history. That immediacy is part of why the app converts so well from install to daily use.
The PlayStation App’s onboarding covers similar ground but adds an extra step for linking trophies and syncing purchase history, which takes marginally longer but pays off with a more complete profile view once finished. Some users report the sync process stalling on first launch, particularly for accounts with years of trophy history spanning PS4 and PS5, though a second attempt after a few minutes typically resolves it. Nintendo’s onboarding is the shortest of the three by necessity, since there is simply less to configure, but that brevity can read as underwhelming to a new user expecting a fuller companion experience after coming from a PlayStation or Xbox background.
Navigation patterns matter for daily use too. Both the PlayStation App and Xbox app organize their interfaces around a bottom tab bar separating home, store, friends, and profile sections, a layout familiar to anyone who has used a modern mobile app in any category. The Switch Online app uses a simpler single-screen hub with a small number of large tiles, which suits its narrower feature set but can feel sparse next to its two rivals, especially on larger phone screens where the extra white space becomes more noticeable.
Real-World Examples: How People Actually Use These Apps
- The pre-order commuter: A player buys a game through the PlayStation App on the train ride home and arrives to find it already installed and ready to launch on their PS5.
- The hotel Wi-Fi remote install: An Xbox player queues a large Call of Duty update from a hotel room the night before a flight, so the console finishes downloading before they land and get home.
- The Splatoon squad: A group of friends coordinates a Splatoon 3 session using the Switch Online app’s voice chat, since the Switch 2 hardware has no built-in party chat of its own.
- The trophy hunter: A completionist checks a game’s trophy rarity percentages in the PlayStation App before deciding whether a platinum run is realistically worth the time.
- The clip sharer: An Xbox player pulls a highlight clip from the in-app activity feed and posts it to social media minutes after a match ends, without ever opening a separate editing tool.
- The parent checking in: A parent glances at push notifications from the Xbox or PlayStation app to see what their kid is playing before setting screen-time limits through the platform’s separate family management tools.
Use Cases: Which App Fits Which Player
Multi-console households with a PS5 as the primary system get the most value from the PlayStation App, particularly for trophy tracking and remote purchases, even accounting for its lower Android star rating. Xbox and PC hybrid players are the clearest fit for the Xbox app, since it is the only one of the three that folds cloud gaming, remote install, party chat, and achievement tracking into a single install with a rating that consistently outperforms both rivals.
Competitive Splatoon 3 or Mario Kart World players who need reliable in-game voice chat have no real alternative to the Switch Online app, limited as it is, since it remains the only sanctioned way to talk during a match on Nintendo hardware. Families managing spending and screen time across multiple kids’ accounts should treat these companion apps as secondary tools and lean on each platform’s dedicated parental control systems instead, since none of the three companion apps was built primarily for that job.
Achievement and trophy hunters who split time between PlayStation and Xbox will notice the tracking experience is genuinely close in quality between the two, with PlayStation’s rarity percentages giving it a slight edge for completionists and Xbox’s Gamerscore total giving it an edge for players who like a single cumulative number to chase. Frequent travelers who want to install large game updates before arriving home get real, tested utility from both the PlayStation App and Xbox app, a workflow the Switch Online app cannot replicate since Nintendo offers no remote install feature at all.
Budget-conscious players who only own a Switch 2 and have no plans to add a PlayStation or Xbox console should not expect the companion app to become more feature-rich anytime soon, and are better served focusing on the console’s native online tools rather than waiting for the mobile app to catch up. Content creators who regularly clip and post gameplay highlights get the most direct workflow from the Xbox app’s built-in clip sharing, since it avoids the extra export step that PlayStation’s screenshot-first approach sometimes requires before a video makes it to a phone’s camera roll.
Setup and Migration Guide: Running All Three Apps
Plenty of players own more than one console, and getting all three companion apps running smoothly side by side takes about fifteen minutes total.
- Download the PlayStation App, Xbox app, and Nintendo Switch Online app from the Apple App Store or Google Play.
- Sign into the PlayStation App with the same PSN account linked to your PS5 or PS5 Pro, then enable push notifications for trophies and messages.
- Pair the PlayStation App with your console under Settings, then Users and Accounts, then Link with Authenticator App or Link with PS App, depending on console firmware.
- Sign into the Xbox app with your Microsoft account and confirm your Xbox console appears under the Consoles tab for remote install to work.
- Turn on Instant-On or Sleep mode on your Xbox console so it can receive remote install commands even when powered down.
- Sign into the Nintendo Switch Online app with your Nintendo Account and link it to your Switch or Switch 2 console via the in-app QR code scanner.
- Confirm your Nintendo Switch Online membership status inside the app, since voice chat and online lobby features will not activate without an active subscription.
- If migrating from an older PS4 or Xbox One setup, re-authenticate each app after any console generation upgrade, since account linking does not always carry over automatically.
- Adjust notification settings individually in each app to avoid triple-alerts for party invites arriving across all three ecosystems at once.
Anyone coming from a single-platform setup and adding a second or third console for the first time should expect the PlayStation and Xbox apps to feel familiar almost immediately, given how similar their core navigation patterns are. The Switch Online app takes a bit more patience, mainly because there is simply less for it to do once account linking is complete.
Common Setup Problems and Fixes
The most frequent complaint tied to the PlayStation App’s account linking step involves the console failing to appear under Settings even after a correct sign-in, which usually resolves by force-closing the app and confirming the PS5 and phone are on the same local network during the initial pairing, even though remote features work fine over separate networks afterward. Xbox app users occasionally run into remote install commands that appear to succeed in the app but never trigger on console, which is almost always traced back to the Xbox being set to a full power-off state rather than Instant-On or Sleep mode.
Nintendo Switch Online app pairing failures are most often caused by an expired or mis-scanned QR code, since the code displayed on the console times out after a short window, so regenerating a fresh code before scanning solves the majority of reported linking issues, a process Nintendo’s own support documentation walks through step by step. Across all three apps, sign-out and sign-back-in remains the single most effective troubleshooting step for missing notifications, since token expiration on the backend is a more common culprit than any client-side bug.
Pros and Cons of Each App
PlayStation App
The PlayStation App’s biggest strength is trophy depth, giving completionists rarity percentages and tier breakdowns no rival matches. Its biggest weakness is the split with PS Remote Play, forcing a second install for anyone who wants to stream their console, and its Android rating of 3.5 stars lags noticeably behind Xbox’s, partly a residue of the 2026 physical-media backlash that tanked one specific update’s score.
Xbox App
The Xbox app’s strength is consolidation, since remote install, party chat, achievements, cloud gaming, and clip sharing all live in one place with the highest ratings of the three apps on both major stores. Its weakness is that some of that convenience, particularly cloud gaming access, effectively requires the pricier Ultimate tier at $22.99 a month to feel fully unlocked.
Nintendo Switch Online App
The Switch Online app’s strength is doing one job, voice chat for supported titles, reasonably well at the lowest subscription price of the three ecosystems. Its weakness is nearly everything else: no remote purchases, no trophy system, no remote play, and the lowest ratings on both app stores by a wide margin.
The Verdict: Which Companion App Actually Wins in 2026
Judged purely on ratings, feature breadth, and consistency across both major app stores, the Xbox app wins this comparison clearly. A 4.6 to 4.7-star aggregate rating from millions of reviews, combined with remote install, in-app party chat, achievement tracking, and built-in cloud gaming access, makes it the most complete companion app of the three, and it is the only one of the group where iOS and Android users report a broadly similar experience.
The PlayStation App earns a strong second place, particularly for trophy hunters who value its rarity-percentage detail, though its lower Android score and the 2026 update controversy that dragged one version down to 1.06 stars keep it from matching Xbox’s consistency. The Nintendo Switch Online app remains the clear third, useful only for what it was built to do, in-game voice chat, and offering almost nothing beyond that narrow lane. For most players juggling more than one platform, the practical takeaway is simple: install all three if you own the hardware, but expect very different amounts of daily usefulness out of each one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a paid subscription to use the PlayStation App?
No. The PlayStation App is free to download and its core features, including browsing the store, checking trophies, and messaging friends, work without an active PS Plus subscription. Online multiplayer itself still requires PS Plus at the console level, but the app does not add a separate paywall on top of that.
Can I stream my PS5 or Xbox console through the main companion app?
Xbox builds cloud gaming access directly into its main app for Game Pass Ultimate subscribers. PlayStation splits this feature into a separate PS Remote Play app rather than including it in the main PlayStation App.
Why is the Nintendo Switch Online app rated lower than PlayStation and Xbox?
The app offers far fewer features than its rivals, with no remote purchases, no trophy or achievement system, and no remote play, which limits its usefulness and shows up in its 3.1-star iOS rating from 13,000 reviews compared to Xbox’s 4.7 stars from 1.7 million reviews.
What caused the PlayStation App’s rating to crash to 1.06 stars in 2026?
Version 26.6.1, released in July 2026, arrived alongside Sony’s broader move away from physical game support, and users directed backlash at the app itself even though the underlying complaint was about company policy rather than an app defect.
Does the Xbox app work the same way on iOS and Android?
Largely yes. It is the most consistent of the three apps across platforms, with a 4.7-star iOS rating and roughly a 4.5-star Android rating, both drawn from millions of reviews rather than a small sample.
Can I remotely buy and install games using the Nintendo Switch Online app?
No. Unlike the PlayStation App and Xbox app, the Switch Online app has no storefront browsing or remote purchase and install functionality, and it is unlikely to gain that feature given Nintendo’s current design philosophy for the app.
Which companion app is best for tracking achievements or trophies?
Both PlayStation and Xbox offer strong tracking, with PlayStation showing trophy rarity percentages by tier and Xbox showing a running Gamerscore total alongside individual achievements. Nintendo has no equivalent system in its app or on its hardware.
Do I need Nintendo Switch Online to use the mobile app at all?
The app itself is free to download and sign into, but nearly all of its practical functionality, including voice chat and online lobby features for supported games, requires an active Nintendo Switch Online membership starting at $19.99 a year.
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