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.
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.
I hadn’t thought about having apps for to use in game mode.
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.
It’s interesting that anytime people use a Windows VM to play multiplayer games of Linux, some devs become very hostile and ban them. But if the same thing happens using an Android VM, there is no noise. Why this difference in attitude? 🤔🤔
The only one I’m aware of is Fallout Shelter. The steam version is out of date but the android version is getting updates and new content.
Think of all the weird minigames that were only ever released on mobile; its Flash Games all over again! This is huge for emulation!