Droid-Deck/DroidDeck

What it does

DroidDeck recreates the SteamOS handheld experience on Android: Steam Gaming Mode, a full Linux desktop, and integration for GOG, Epic Games, Xbox and other storefronts, plus Steam VR. It targets Android gaming handhelds and, according to the support matrix, some smart glasses. The project is GPL-3.0 and states there are no ads or telemetry. x86 Windows games run through FEX and Proton, while the Linux runtime is layered on Android without root.

Getting started

1. Check the device requirements: Android 9 or newer with Adreno 730 or newer, or any Adreno 8xx. Adreno 6xx is experimental; Mali, Xclipse, PowerVR and Adreno 710 are unsupported.
2. Free about 3 GB for the runtime, plus 1.1 GB for the desktop and emulators.
3. Install the 0.6.9 APK, then install the Linux runtime from inside the app.
4. Press Play and sign in to Steam.
5. On Android 14 and newer, enable Disable child process restrictions in Developer options. On Android 12 and 13, Steam's first launch offers a Fix it for me button for the same setup.

For bugs, the project asks for the zip produced by Share logs in the Discord #bug-reports channel. Smart-glasses setup lives in the support matrix, and changes per version are in release notes.

Building from source

The build needs Docker, Java 17, the Android SDK and NDK, Rust via rustup, GitHub CLI, Python 3 and zstd. Run:

tools/build_local.sh

The APK is written to app/build/outputs/apk/release/. Install it with tools/deploy_local.sh; after the first build, ./gradlew :app:assembleRelease reuses the prepared inputs. Unit tests run with ./gradlew -PskipRust=true :app:testDebugUnitTest. Windows users have the scripts tools/run_windows.ps1 and tools/prepare_windows_runtime.py.

Constraints

Device compatibility and performance vary. Desktop compositing is software-rendered, and Firefox sandboxing is reduced under proot. The Android 14+ child-process setting is a required step for Steam to run. The APK is distributed only through this repository's releases; the project states it has no separate website. The README credits a long list of upstream components, including FEX, Wine/Proton, Mesa Turnip, Flatpak, Syncthing and MediaPipe, under their respective licenses.

HotRepo's take

DroidDeck is a large Kotlin project claiming to bring the SteamOS gaming stack to ARM Android devices, with substantial implementation detail in its credits: FEX for x86 execution, Proton patches for Wine, a custom HUD, smart-glasses drivers and Joy-Con hand tracking. The main delivery path is a prebuilt APK, and the README gives no independent verifiable build identity, so readers should weigh the download accordingly rather than rely on the star count alone. HotRepo has no ranked snapshot or discussion record for this repository to corroborate its current momentum.