Valve welcomes Android games to Steam

You can think about The just-announced Steam framework As a wireless VR headset for your PC, or a Steam Deck for your face. But another way to think about it is that Valve has finally entered the mobile world. Not only does The Frame run Windows games on an Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, but Valve will now support and encourage developers to bring their Android apps to Steam as well.

Valve engineer Jeremy Silan says the company will try to make some of them first-class citizens, too Edge. “From a user’s perspective, we’d rather they not think about it, just have their titles on Steam, download them and press play.”

Valve says Steam Frame can use the same Android APKs developers already use to bring their apps to phones and Android-based VR headsets like the Meta Quest — and it’s launching the Steam Frame Developer Kit program to help get the hardware into developers’ hands.

It seems like Valve is specifically hoping to attract some Meta VR game developers, rather than just any kind of Android app you might find on a tablet or phone. “It’s really VR developers that want to publish their own VR content, and they’re porting the VR title to mobile where they’re familiar with how to create these APKs,” says Ceylan. “They are now free to bring these elements to Steam, and they will only work on that device.”

In terms of performance, Ceylan suggests that it should be excellent because the code runs locally. Although Valve’s SteamOS is not Android and needs to use its Proton compatibility layer to make apps feel at home, the Arm code will run on an Arm processor without having to compile first.

When I ask about non-game Android apps — and I mention how I’d really like to see things like Discord voice chat in Steam, not just the Wallpaper Engine — Valve seems less confident. “We’ve never stopped people from doing that,” says Valve’s Lawrence Yang. “We are a gaming company and we focus on games, but as I said, there are a lot of things on Steam that are tools, like Blender for example.”

“We don’t have enough work to show you today,” Selan chimes in, “but our intention is to have rich browser integration, so at any given time you’ll be able to bring up a browser, have floating windows, and all the multitasking environments you’d expect, so you can definitely go to any website and get those apps.”

“I know there’s a difference between that and what you asked for, but we expect this will close a lot of that gap.”

Will there be a way to quickly launch these web apps from Steam, allowing users to turn them into buttons, perhaps? “This is our hope,” Ceylan says. “I don’t want to promise that at launch, but this is our hope.”

Valve likes to build for the long term, and I’d be surprised if its plans begin and end with Android-based VR games for Steam Frame. I think this is probably the tip of the iceberg. For one thing, it feels like it Google will soon be forced to open up Android to alternative app storesso Steam may soon be able to easily sell games on phones just as its competitor Epic is trying to do.

in the meantime, Nexus players Reports You will also be able to upload Android APK files to Steam Frame as well.

But Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais also hints that there’s potential to bring SteamOS to other devices with Arm chips, at least one day. He told me that he believes Steam Frame paves the way for SteamOS to run on “a wide range of Arm devices,” including laptops, and Arm clearly has “a lot of potential” in future mobile devices.