Having spent the bulk of my handheld gaming time with the Steam Deck, it was a bit of a shock last year to discover that PC gaming isn’t just possible on Android phones and retro handhelds, it’s powering on in leaps and bounds.
I’ve seen so many different games running beautifully, from older AAA titles like Tomb Raider and Prey (2017), all the way to more demanding ones like RDR2 and even Cyberpunk 2077 (no surprise that the last one is still an imperfect experience, as things stand…but it is possible!).
GameNative lets you play all manner of PC games on Android from GOG, Epic, and Steam.
I reached out to my friend Utkarsh, who is the lead developer of GameNative to ask if he wanted to share his story and let me interview him.
His background in development and gaming through to how GameNative started and is built, all the way to what the future might bring for his program. This is an interview on what I think might be at least part of the future of handheld gaming, and I hope you find this interesting:
https://gardinerbryant.com/i-genuinely-feel-gamenative-could-replace-handheld-pcs/
Reliable Android emulation of Windows’-compatible work programs is, too, a rather interesting niche. Laptop-alikes of tablets with a keyboard are popular in lower budget segment, and if they become viable replacements for desk job workflows, that may cause corpos to consider that.
Russia has a couple of Linux distros and companies providing custom compatibility settings and wine prefixes to set a client with all the ancient accounting software they are used to work in, so there is a market, but the one completely unprepared for Android devices being capable of doing it as well as desktops.
I’d suggest the dev to look into it because, I suspect, when the turtles of corpo world would take a taste of that, they may form a competetitive market of providing GameNative’s tooling to their clients in exchange for extremely beefy contracts, while outsourcing resulting errors back to them to fix.