Maybe in the future a smaller version of a Steam Deck could be possible, based on ARM, as ARM is more energy efficient and smaller. Valve is supporting FEX (an x86-64 to ARM64 emulator / translator) and the Steam Frame is based on ARM that can play your Steam library too. I would love to have a small Steam Boy thing. :-) In fact I would be even happy if its weaker than the Steam Deck!
And if VALVE is not doing this, some other company might using SteamOS. But not in this economy.
Thats basically gamehub on android. There’s other forks of it that arent as shitty but I still don’t really intend on using it outside of checking up on progress every now and then. I think gamehub is gamesir the company that locks their switch emulator based off stolen code, and requiring physically for you to use one of their controllers. So I don’t like the idea of them in general, even ignoring the privacy issues.
But I do hope that steam os becomes popular for this. If I understand it correctly the frame is going to run off arch64 and use a combo of android, and fex translation layers so it will be extreamly versatile. Right now one of the closes things I experienced is Ubuntu touch, but you have to do everything in libertine containers and even native Linux apps don’t always work well, along with waydroid.
The progress with fex is already impressive and if it matures anything like proton did, it might be just as simple. I can throw a pirated Photoshop 1.6 cs or something into bottles with proton ge and it works. Sure might not be the version anyone wants anymore but I can say “we have Photoshop” now.
Even if people don’t use steam is directly I think there will be community made projects that essentially just bundle in almost the same experience using the same tools valve is using. Kinda like how bazzite or cachyos make it easy to have a steam deck experience out of the box and focuses on more gaming specific utilities that the steam deck comes bundled with.
And its not going to be good right away. Proton kind of sucked when the the first steam decks where released. It has to be out there and start getting put through the paces, people need to be making reports on protondb, etc. When I got a q2 steam deck it was pretty much only the indie games and native Linux games that worked fine. Outside of that it didnt work or there was actual fiddling you had to do, and protonGE was more nessisary to use over proton.
The hardest part is everyone needs universal hardware. The os would have to be made for a few select phones, because with these bundles of translation layers like gamehub its a lot of tweaking and toggling on and off stuff that you don’t always fully know what it does or understand why you need it. Sometimes you have a shitty processor so you have to toggle a different series of settings to get them to work with your hardware, and the experience isnt always going to be the same.
If you are interacting with Gamehub (proprietary), then I would look into Gamehub-lite (the patches are Open Source on top of the proprietary original): https://github.com/Producdevity/gamehub-lite
GameHub Lite is a modified version of GameHub that:
Removes bloat - Cloud Streaming, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Social features, etc.
Removes account requirement - Use the app without logging in
Reduces app size - From 118MB to 52MB (-56%)
Removes unnecessary permissions - Location, contacts, phone state, etc.
Adds offline support - Works without constant network connectivity
Changes package name - gamehub.lite for side-by-side installation
Adds custom news page - Uses community API for updates
https://gamenative.app/ - And then there is GameNative, which is entirely Open Source. Some say that the GameHub devs stealing code or ideas from GameNative, because its suspicious whenever they have a new feature, it only takes very short amount of time for GameHub to do it too. But nobody knows. So I would personally recommend GameNative instead.
I personally didn’t experiment with ARM yet, outside Raspberry Pie 3B and that is ages ago (10 years…). And off course phones. The Steam Frame is really something else and more than just VR. I’m surprised it will have Android app support. Maybe Valve plans on adding an Android category that is not VR related? But I guess developers would need to release and upload their games to this shop, similar to how they do it on Google or F-Droid. This is highly speculative from my part BTW, there are no words about that. Valve tried to expand into films too, which would have been something like Amazon Prime videos or like that. BTW I would love to watch a film in VR.
Android support is to run the apks that the meta quests use to play natively, sense they just use a modified version of android they’re pretty much mobile phones already.
But yes this does mean steam is adding support for apks technically. I just don’t know if that means we will get steam on android. It just means that for sure they are allowing developers to choose to let you run the apk or the scaled version of the PC version.
Most likely the PC versions are going to run worse for a good while, but this is when it will it will start to improve the most.
Technically sense the steam frame runs on arm its technically native but because its on arch64 they will need something like waydroid if that’s not what they are already using.
Also I’ve used both of those forks I think, I don’t remember which one I prefer I have to relearn everything everytime I tinker with it. I don’t really use those apps but when I get new phones or arm based gaming handhelds I gotta put it through the ringer first to see what it can do.
Maybe in the future a smaller version of a Steam Deck could be possible, based on ARM, as ARM is more energy efficient and smaller. Valve is supporting FEX (an x86-64 to ARM64 emulator / translator) and the Steam Frame is based on ARM that can play your Steam library too. I would love to have a small Steam Boy thing. :-) In fact I would be even happy if its weaker than the Steam Deck!
And if VALVE is not doing this, some other company might using SteamOS. But not in this economy.
Thats basically gamehub on android. There’s other forks of it that arent as shitty but I still don’t really intend on using it outside of checking up on progress every now and then. I think gamehub is gamesir the company that locks their switch emulator based off stolen code, and requiring physically for you to use one of their controllers. So I don’t like the idea of them in general, even ignoring the privacy issues.
But I do hope that steam os becomes popular for this. If I understand it correctly the frame is going to run off arch64 and use a combo of android, and fex translation layers so it will be extreamly versatile. Right now one of the closes things I experienced is Ubuntu touch, but you have to do everything in libertine containers and even native Linux apps don’t always work well, along with waydroid.
The progress with fex is already impressive and if it matures anything like proton did, it might be just as simple. I can throw a pirated Photoshop 1.6 cs or something into bottles with proton ge and it works. Sure might not be the version anyone wants anymore but I can say “we have Photoshop” now.
Even if people don’t use steam is directly I think there will be community made projects that essentially just bundle in almost the same experience using the same tools valve is using. Kinda like how bazzite or cachyos make it easy to have a steam deck experience out of the box and focuses on more gaming specific utilities that the steam deck comes bundled with.
And its not going to be good right away. Proton kind of sucked when the the first steam decks where released. It has to be out there and start getting put through the paces, people need to be making reports on protondb, etc. When I got a q2 steam deck it was pretty much only the indie games and native Linux games that worked fine. Outside of that it didnt work or there was actual fiddling you had to do, and protonGE was more nessisary to use over proton.
The hardest part is everyone needs universal hardware. The os would have to be made for a few select phones, because with these bundles of translation layers like gamehub its a lot of tweaking and toggling on and off stuff that you don’t always fully know what it does or understand why you need it. Sometimes you have a shitty processor so you have to toggle a different series of settings to get them to work with your hardware, and the experience isnt always going to be the same.
If you are interacting with Gamehub (proprietary), then I would look into Gamehub-lite (the patches are Open Source on top of the proprietary original): https://github.com/Producdevity/gamehub-lite
https://gamenative.app/ - And then there is GameNative, which is entirely Open Source. Some say that the GameHub devs stealing code or ideas from GameNative, because its suspicious whenever they have a new feature, it only takes very short amount of time for GameHub to do it too. But nobody knows. So I would personally recommend GameNative instead.
I personally didn’t experiment with ARM yet, outside Raspberry Pie 3B and that is ages ago (10 years…). And off course phones. The Steam Frame is really something else and more than just VR. I’m surprised it will have Android app support. Maybe Valve plans on adding an Android category that is not VR related? But I guess developers would need to release and upload their games to this shop, similar to how they do it on Google or F-Droid. This is highly speculative from my part BTW, there are no words about that. Valve tried to expand into films too, which would have been something like Amazon Prime videos or like that. BTW I would love to watch a film in VR.
Android support is to run the apks that the meta quests use to play natively, sense they just use a modified version of android they’re pretty much mobile phones already.
But yes this does mean steam is adding support for apks technically. I just don’t know if that means we will get steam on android. It just means that for sure they are allowing developers to choose to let you run the apk or the scaled version of the PC version.
Most likely the PC versions are going to run worse for a good while, but this is when it will it will start to improve the most.
Technically sense the steam frame runs on arm its technically native but because its on arch64 they will need something like waydroid if that’s not what they are already using.
Also I’ve used both of those forks I think, I don’t remember which one I prefer I have to relearn everything everytime I tinker with it. I don’t really use those apps but when I get new phones or arm based gaming handhelds I gotta put it through the ringer first to see what it can do.
Steam Frame uses Lepton, which is a fork of Waydroid (similar to how Proton is a fork of WINE).