I've always found it strange that phones never really went this way. There are attachments, I've seen attempts. But it just seems like such a large and available market to overlook.
What works about the switch is the option. I can play handheld or pop it in its dock and play on the TV with other people. Phones never quite got this. They had the mobile part built-in, but attempts at multiplayer on a screen were either ignored or botched horrifically.
There's another big challenge with phone games, in my opinion ...
Phones are also very personal, and I've observed that people are less likely to commit to longer-term games on their phones for some reason. Some of it is no doubt inertia - the early games on mobile were meant to be played in full in under an hour. But part of it is - I think - that having your phone occupied by something persistent like a game robs people of their ability to use the phone in the open gaps we normally use phones.
Things like Switch or Stadia or whatever are dedicated gaming devices, even if they slingshot from your phone's computing power. I can use them and still have my phone in front of me. They do one thing and get out of the way.
That's all depressing to write out, but it's the world we live in.
But the Switch, being a dedicated system for this, doesn't have to put nearly as much work into the implementation. You can easily just throw it into a dock and leave it there indefinitely, because you don't need it for anything else. While you can cast a phone wirelessly, the setup will depend largely on your ecosystem and/or accessory vendors. And even then, the entire thing is typically mirrored - which not only leaves the rest of your device otherwise unusable, but also raises further cases to handle around notifications (or worse, calls) while you're actually gaming on it.
These issues would make single-player gaming annoying enough, and local multiplayer effectively becomes a nonstarter. (Never mind that one you introduce that as a requirement you also introduce the need to set up additional controllers a nontrivial amount of the time, and fast pair support within the Bluetooth spec is just as messy.)
For phones to really be able to cover these things without introducing tradeoffs that just don't exist with a dedicated device, we'd need OS- and hardware- level support for running a secondary display, wirelessly, without also introducing lag in the process.
Effectively, we're comparing them to the wrong platform. Because while the internals most directly line up with those of the Switch, the interface design they'd need in order to really make the experience work is arguably a lot closer to that of the Wii U.
[0] Note that, for the sake of this discussion, on Android's side I'm referring strictly to what's available in AOSP. I'm aware of, say, DeX, but the app ecosystem as a whole doesn't tend to have great support for vendor-specific implementations, and the stock desktop mode is still a. experimental, b. wired.
The most likely path would’ve been if an existing gaming company made a handheld that was also a phone, but Microsoft doesn’t have a handheld entry, Sony’s Vita go down well, and Nintendo is just not really interested.
This thing also costs $699, which is quite a bit more money than say a Switch. In fact a Switch is pretty much the cousin of a phone, hardware wise.
They use similar components, but designed very differently:
Switch has dedicated controller, phones don't, at least the vast majority of them.
Switch has lower resolution, targeting framerate instead.
Switch has active cooling for sustained performance, phones usually only work on short bursts.
Switch is cheap, comparing to premium phones.
Phones are ok for a lot of things, but good for nothing, while Switch is good at gaming, undeniably the 1st in the mobile gaming market.
This was a bit half-baked. It didn't even get the update to Ice Cream Sandwich.
It flopped. Horribly.