TL;DR Valve has confirmed that Android games are now welcomed and supported on Steam.
The company says the Steam Frame headset also supports the same APKs that developers are using for mobile and Meta Quest headsets.
This also comes after it emerged that the Steam Frame apparently supports sideloading APKs.
Valve just announced some new Steam devices, including the Steam Frame headset. We previously heard that you can sideload Android APKs on the headset, and it turns out that Valve is also opening the door to Android games on Steam.
Valve told The Verge that it now supports and welcomes Android games on Steam, and that the Steam Frame supports the same APKs developers are already using to publish their games on mobile and Meta’s Quest VR headsets.
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Of course, Meta Quest headsets run a modified version of Android. So this move seems like a wise strategy to ensure that games available on Meta headsets can easily be ported to Steam. This should make life easier for developers, as they don’t have to spend a ton of time creating a brand-new Steam Frame port of their games.
“From the user’s perspective, our preference is that they don’t even have to think about it, they just have their titles on Steam, they download them and hit play,” Valve’s Jeremy Selan told the outlet.
Selan also noted that these games should deliver great performance on the Steam Frame as they’re effectively running natively (it’s Arm-based code on an Arm-based Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, after all). However, the company will still reportedly implement its Proton compatibility layer for an improved experience.
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