Android games are normally going to be inferior to Steam games, but this is still a nice option for games that aren’t available on Steam or can’t be played due to anti-cheat reasons.
You can read more about Waydroid here. There are reasons to believe valve is working on adding official Waydroid support to Deck, but until then you can install it this way.
I would use this for the apps
This is actually pretty cool. I’m going to try it out, even if I have no idea of what to actually play with this!
I would play honor of kings on my deck
Do you happen to know if these are account based or APK based? As in, is this something I connect my google account to or am I going to need all my APK’s?
You can install Gapps to use the play store, or use other stores like Aurora or F-droid. You can also install apps directly from apk.
Aurora store doesn’t work for me on X86 platform. Neigher through Waydroid neither through Android Studio emulator. It just hangs after initial setup.
Are there games exclusive to mobile that are worth having on deck?
Edit: (as in suggestions)
I would prefer the official YouTube client and web browsers properly developed for touch to be available in game mode. The best touch browser is currently Angelfish and that’s not a robust browser.
It’s rare, but yes. There are some games with kernel anticheat that can only be installed on Deck with windows or android app support. There are games that you may not own on PC, or are much cheaper for the phone version. Some games get dramatically better battery performance if you run the phone version vs the PC version (the recent Roblox tool claims up to 4x the performance by running the mobile version). Finally there are some games that aren’t on PC at all.
