Will Valve Integrate Waydroid Android Emulator into Steam Platform?
TapTechNews July 4th news, according to the informant Bradley Lynch, Valve may be planning to integrate the Waydroid Android emulator into the Steam platform.
According to TapTechNews' understanding, Waydroid is an open-source Android emulator suitable for GNU/Linux systems, and its official website overview is as follows:
Waydroid allows you to run all your favorite Android apps on the desktop and can work side by side with Linux applications. The Android system in the container has direct access to the required hardware, and the Android runtime environment has a slightly customized LineageOS system image built in.
Waydroid runs a complete Android system in the container using Linux namespaces (user, pid, uts, net, mount, ipc), and can provide Android applications on any GNU/Linux-based platform (arm, arm64, x86, x86_64). The Android system in the container can directly access the required hardware through the LXC and Binder interfaces.
This project is completely free and open source, and currently the code repository is hosted on GitHub. Waydroid integrates with the Linux system, allowing Android applications to appear in the application folder along with Linux applications. Waydroid has added many new features on top of expanding the definition of Android's free window. Waydroid can not only meet the daily application use, but also be used for games and full-screen entertainment, and users can enable the full Android interface. At the same time, Waydroid uses Wayland and AOSP Mesa to maximize performance.
Steam application development marked with a new emulator logo started on May 30th and has continued until five days ago.
It is speculated that Valve may be more interested in integrating this emulator into SteamDeck, rather than PCs. After all, there are other solutions for running Android games on the Windows platform already. In addition, Waydroid currently only supports Intel and AMD graphics cards, while the Nvidia graphics cards used by most Steam desktop users can only rely on software rendering and cannot enjoy GPU acceleration, which is not a problem for SteamDeck with AMD Zen2/RDNA2 hardware.