You can think of the recently announced Steam Frame as a wireless VR headset for your PC, or a Steam Deck for your face. But another way to think about it is that Valve is finally entering the mobile arena. The Frame not only runs Windows games on its Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon chip — Valve will now also support and encourage developers to bring their Android apps to Steam.
Valve engineer Jeremy Sellon explains that it will also try to make some of them first-class citizens The Verge“From a user perspective, our priority is that they don’t have to think about it, they just have their titles on Steam, they download them and press play,”
Valve says Steam Frame can use the same Android APKs that developers already use to bring their apps to phones and Android-based VR headsets like the Meta Quest — and it’s launching a Steam Frame Developer Kit program to help get the hardware into the hands of developers.
It seems like Valve is specifically hoping to attract some of those meta VR game developers, rather than any kind of Android app you’d find on a tablet or phone. “They’re actually VR developers who want to publish their VR content, and they’re porting a mobile VR title where they’re already familiar with how to create those APKs,” says Selan. “They are now free to bring these to Steam, and they will only work on this device.”
In terms of performance, Selen suggests it should be excellent as the code runs seamlessly. While Valve’s SteamOS is not Android and needs to use its Proton compatibility layer to make apps feel at home, Arm code will run on Arm processors without requiring translation first.
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When I ask about Android apps beyond games — and mention that I’d really like to see things like Discord voice chat in Steam, not just a wallpaper engine — Valve seems a little less convinced. “We’ve never stopped people from doing that,” says Valve’s Lawrence Yang. “We’re a game company and we focus on games, but as you said, there are a lot of things on Steam that are tools, for example software like Blender.”
“We don’t have it working exactly to show you today, but our intent is to have rich browser integration, so at any time you’ll be able to bring up a browser, have floating windows, all the multitasking environments you expect, so you can certainly go to any website and have those apps present,” Selan said.
“I know there is a difference between this and what you asked, but we hope this will bridge the gap significantly.”
Would there be a way to instantly launch those web apps from Steam and let users turn them into buttons, perhaps? “That’s our hope. I don’t want to promise this for launch, but that’s our hope,” Selen says.
Valve likes to build for the long term, and I’d be surprised if its plans begin and end with an Android-based VR game for the Steam Frame. I think this is probably the tip of the iceberg. For one thing, it looks like Google will soon be forced to open up alternative app stores for Android, so Steam may soon be able to easily sell games on phones, as its rival Epic is trying to do.
In the meantime, Gamers Nexus Report that you will be able to sideload Android APKs onto Steam Frame as well.
But Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais also hints that there’s at least a possibility of bringing SteamOS to other devices with Arm chips someday. He told me he thinks Steam Frame paves the way for SteamOS to work on “a variety of Arm devices,” including laptops, and that Arm clearly has “a lot of potential” in future handhelds.
