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(note: I'm not the author of this, don't know if/how it works, and just found it using a 'random' Google search)

For a non-ROS solution: apparently there are tools that can do this. See droidpad fi (Github repository here). It's a bit unclear, but if this creates an actual joystick device under Linux (uses uinput, so potentially it should/could), it should work just like any other joystick, and you'd be able to use the regular joy node(s) and everything else that works with Linux joysticks.

A different approach is taken with the various Android 'teleop' applications, which connect to a remote ROS node graph and directly publish geometry_msgs/Twist and associated messages. An example would be com.github.rosjava.android_apps.teleop.indigo (playstore link).