With the Announcement of the new Steam Frame, it has been confirmed that Valve has been working on x86 emulation on android for some time, with active development efforts to patch holes in FEX.

I've taken a look into apps such as gamehub, gamehub lite, and gamenative and it appears that the primary translation layer being used here is FEX, so the increase in functionality and compatibility of the apps can largely be traced back to a push by Valve engineers. The current apps however require you to login to your Steam Account via a third party app which is unappealing to many users, and the alternatives to this have much higher friction for getting setup.

I'm hoping that we see this ARM functionality expanded beyond just a Steam OS release on android for the Frame, into allowing users to access the translation layers and download games directly in the Steam App. This functionality removes friction for mobile gamers, and gives Valve direct access to a much larger market for game sales without even needing to sell new hardware.

You can make the argument that may phones won't perform well, but the newer chips do surprisingly well with the new pushes in development. For example, on handheld android devices with chips such as the snapdragon 8 gen 2, you can play games such as hollow knight silksong at 60 fps with steam cloud saves enabled using gamehub right now. This is downloaded and running locally on the device. 3D games are much more inconsistent, but are improving.

I would love to see this enabled as a native functionality within the Steam Ecosystem in the future. Thanks for reading, leave your thoughts below!