The name Lepton appeared on Steam and SteamDB just a few weeks after Valve unveiled the Steam Frame headset, which will be able to run Android apps.
In our new interview with Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais, he mentioned the Frame uses “a similar compatibility layer as Proton, just targeted at Android.”
[Image: https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/steam-lepton-header.jpg?quality=90&strip=all]
No, Waydroid merely used other projects wrapped in some crappy Python scripts & had a multitude of issues. If it is anything like Waydroid then I’ll lose respect for Valve.
We know that it started as a fork of Waydroid
But:
That is all really useful info to have. Google Play Games for Windows uses their own crosvm sandbox, which has a couple—but not many—hack-a-rounds to run regular apps & for Houdini (ARM translation). And Android source code makes multiple mentions of a container-based Android sandbox. What sucks is that Microsoft discontinued WSA & that Google won’t release a modern standard desktop-based Android layer because it is so “security-concious” (aka fragile) that they are worried about users abusing the APIs it exposes.
After finishing to read the interview it does indeed sound different, but it is odd that this isn’t open-source somewhere like Proton and Fex always were.