Sony has contracted accessory company Backbone to make a PlayStation version of the excellent Backbone One mobile controller for iPhone, which is now available at Backbone and Best Buy. It gives off PS Vita vibes, except somehow Sony agreed with Backbone to keep its Xbox-like analog stick layout. The $99.99 controller, which can be opened to fit iPhones as small as the 13 Mini and as large as the 13 Pro Max, features a new mix of black and white, just like the PS5’s DualSense controller . Of course, this is a more expensive solution than connecting one of Sony’s controllers to your phone, but it’s a more elegant way to play PlayStation games using Remote Play, Sony’s mobile app that streams games from your console PS4 or PS5.
It’s identical in price and design to the all-black Backbone One 2020 that’s still on sale, except for one big change: cross, circle, triangle, and square buttons instead of A, B, X, and Y to match directions of the game button you’ll see in PlayStation games on mobile. You can use it to play on Apple Arcade, Xbox Game Pass, and Stadia, but the button directions won’t match what’s shown on the screen unless a developer has programmed their game to support PlayStation button icons.
I’ve spent a few hours with the PlayStation Edition of the Backbone One, and it’s the same great controller as before, with comfortable grips, a logical button layout, good trigger responsiveness, and convenient features like Lightning passthrough charging and a 3.5 mm earphone. audio pass through port. Also, its orange Backbone button works like the PS home button in Remote Play when you hold it down.
The face buttons look similar to the DualSense.
“Which PlayStation games on mobile,” you might ask? Unlike Microsoft, Sony doesn’t have a robust cloud-based offering for PS Plus subscribers on phones, and we may be waiting a while for Sony to follow through on any of its promises to bring several games from its PlayStation catalog to mobile. here in 2025. So at launch, Sony and Backbone are banking on this controller as the most faithful way (other than just pairing a DualSense with your iPhone) to play PlayStation games from your PS4 console or Existing PS5.
For the uninitiated, Sony’s Remote Play app for mobile lets you access your PS4 or PS5 games while roaming around your home. It sounds great and is capable of delivering a decent experience. I could load up Tetris Effect: Connected almost anywhere and have a good time playing over Wi-Fi at home, which is how I imagine most people might use Remote Play. Now, you can also play Remote Play outside of your home via LTE or 5G (if this is the first time you’re hearing this news, you’re not alone), although fast-paced games like Returnal didn’t play as well over LTE . or even 5G for me. Your enjoyment may vary depending on your Wi-Fi hardware and network coverage.
I can get over Remote Play’s latency, but there are other lingering annoyances here. Backbone’s orange button can be pressed and held to take you back to the PlayStation 5 home screen to switch games, which is cool. However, doing so skips the toolbar that allows you to easily put the console to sleep. So you’ll need to use your iPhone’s touchscreen to open PS’s virtual home button and navigate to the option, or when you manually disconnect from Remote Play, you can set the console to automatically go into of rest This feels a little more annoying than it should be. It’s also annoying that if you switch out of the Remote Play app, even briefly, you’ll have to reconnect to your console.
This PlayStation edition of the Backbone model could be said to be Sony’s way of re-entering the mobile gaming world, similar to the launch of its InZone PC gaming monitor to capture some of the gaming market of pc.
The release of this controller is an intriguing move, both for Backbone, a small company still building on its first successful product, and for Sony, which has outsourced to a third-party company to make hardware very official looking on his behalf. I wonder if outsourcing will allow Sony to release mobile games faster than if they were chasing their own mobile controller; Sony published patents in late 2021 for a controller that looks like a DualShock 4 split in half. And maybe, having a bunch of these controllers out there could finally convince Sony to launch a proper cloud gaming service on mobile.
Excited to be thinking about the future, I can’t recommend that current owners upgrade just to get the PS specific buttons unless you’re a PlayStation fanatic. Even for die-hards, I would really question how much you enjoy remote play. Right now, Sony’s mobile gaming strategy outside of streaming from your console is non-existent.
Backbone confirmed that this PlayStation edition of the Backbone One will be exclusive to iOS. The company has an Android version of the One in the works, which will launch in November.
Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge