An open-source app called DroidDeck lets you run the Steam client and Windows games directly on an Android phone, with no PC streaming the game and no cloud involved. The project is free and requires a phone with a Snapdragon processor, and early tests have already shown numbers suggesting real use on the most powerful devices.
Performance was checked by YouTuber ETA Prime, who used a RedMagic 11 Pro with a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, 16 GB of memory and liquid cooling. Cyberpunk 2077 ran at around 60 FPS with medium settings at 720p. Skyrim Special Edition reached a similar figure, while Left 4 Dead 2 hit its 120 FPS cap. Hogwarts Legacy proved more demanding, sitting around 40 FPS even with lower settings and FSR enabled.
The difference from existing solutions is substantial. Steam Link streams a game from another computer, whereas DroidDeck runs everything on the device. The app launches Valve's ARM64 Linux Steam client in Big Picture mode as a regular Android app, and Windows games run through Valve's ARM64 Proton, with FEX translating x86 instructions. FEX is an open-source emulator that converts code written for Intel and AMD processors to the ARM architecture used in phones.
The project also differs from Armada, which replaces Android with SteamOS. DroidDeck needs neither that nor root access. It handles GPU driver switching, AMD FSR and Snapdragon GSR upscaling, Steam Input support and frame generation via Lossless Scaling. It can also add GOG, Epic Games and Amazon Games titles as non-Steam games and launch them through Proton.
There are precise limits. DroidDeck targets Adreno 730 and newer GPUs, including the full Adreno 8xx family; Adreno 6xx support is experimental, while Mali, Xclipse, PowerVR and Adreno 710 are unsupported. It requires Android 9 or later, and users must turn off Android's child-process restrictions before Steam will launch. The Linux runtime takes about 3 GB of storage. Results vary considerably by device and game, and the project is still in development at version 0.3.2.
Valve does not officially support Steam for Linux on ARM, and DroidDeck is not affiliated with the company. The topic does, however, track what Valve is preparing on ARM: with the Steam Frame, the company is working on a version of SteamOS for ARM processors, and FEX is one of the tools that make x86 game compatibility possible. Qualcomm, for its part, is reportedly considering official GPU drivers for PC games on Android, a step that could make some community solutions unnecessary.
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