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Comment by bowbe | Hacker News Reader

I mostly see this recommended for people who want to play mobile games on a Steam Deck.

But are there still mobile games worth playing when you have access to steam?

TFT from Riot Games would be a good example. Protected by Vanguard so you can not use wine. However you need an arm device, since they do not publish apks for x86.

Couldn't you use qemu-user (and binfmt_misc) to run ARM binaries under emulation on x86? I suppose you might also need ARM-specific system libraries installed - these can easily coexist with their x86-64 versions on a standard Linux install (see "multiarch") but I'm not sure if Android allows the same.

Since this needs 3d acceleration I would guess this does not work? Waydroid is insanely good with this (when it is running).

Why wouldn't 3d acceleration work? It's not like the ARM code includes custom 3d drivers, it's going to rely on the same 3d support as everything else.

Somewhat weirdly, if you want to play Minecraft Bedrock (not the classic Java version, but the one developed for handhelds, consoles, and Windows) on the SteamDeck this appears to be the most solid path. I've played it and it works.

I use it for this; found out about it when I installed Bazzite on my ROG Ally and it came with Waydroid.

The other useful feature for me is using the Android apps for media subscriptions that only enable offline downloads in the app and not in the browser so I can use them on the go.

Ahhh, that actually makes a lot of sense. I didn't even think of games. Maybe I'll use it to play Candy Crush.

Isn't there already a PC version of that? It always seems to be pinned to the Start menu of new Windows installations, but maybe that's also via some sort of Android compatibility layer

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