As spotted by leaker Bradley Lynch, Valve might be working on integrating the Waydroid Android emulator into Steam. Waydroid is an open source Android emulator for GNU/Linux systems. Here's the official overview from the emulator's website:
- Waydroid brings all the apps you love right to your desktop, working side by side with your Linux applications. The Android inside the container has direct access to the needed hardware. The Android runtime environment ships with a minimal customized Android system image based on LineageOS.
- Waydroid uses Linux namespaces (user, pid, uts, net, mount, ipc) to run a full Android system in a container and provide Android applications on any GNU/Linux-based platform (arm, arm64, x86, x86_64). The Android system inside the container has direct access to needed hardware through LXC and the binder interface.
- The Project is completely free and open-source. Currently, our repo is hosted on GitHub.
- Waydroid is integrated with Linux, adding the Android apps to your Linux applications folder.
- Waydroid expands on Android freeform window definition, adding a number of features.
- For gaming and full screen entertainment, it can also be run to show the full Android UI.
- Get the best performance possible using wayland and AOSP mesa, taking things to the next level.
Work on a Steam app featuring the logo above (which is brand new for the emulator) began on May 30 and continued all the way until five days ago.
Speculation is that Valve might be interested in the emulator more for the Steam Deck than for its PC users. After all, there are other ways to play Android games on Windows, such as a dedicated app made by Google. Moreover, the current version of Waydroid only works on Intel and AMD GPUs, while NVIDIA GPUs (the majority of the Steam desktop userbase) would have to run on software rendering without GPU acceleration. Of course, this isn't an issue on Steam Deck since it's powered by AMD Zen 2/RDNA 2 hardware.
Would you be interested in playing Android games on your Steam Deck?
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