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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

How long before Steam for Android? And Portal for Android?

Steam for Android? What for?

Android already has a game store. It doesn't make any business sense for Valve to try to compete with Google Play Store.

About Portal: It has to be profitable enough to justify the huge cost of porting the game to Android. The same for any other game.

Ubuntu also already has an app store (Which does support paid apps).

Well steam is already on android, just no games

Right now, they have an app with which you can view Steam profiles and text chat.

I'm excited for the eventual Steam Apk Store and Steam Games for Android.

Don't forget the app's main purpose (buying games).

I'm pretty sure Google will ban it. They don't allow competing app stores (same reason Amazon basically forked the entire stack for their Kindle devices).

Maybe Valve will distribute Steam Android devices, but that seems silly.

If Valve wants to get mobile, they need to hope for the success of Ubuntu Phone / Plasma Active / Tizen. Even Ubuntu Phone is probably going to block in the Canonical app store competing markets.

You can download Amazon AppStore on your Android phone, but you can't find it on Google Play, you have to download the apk from Amazon website.

By stack I mean app store stack. If Valve releases Steam for Android you will have to manually get it from them because Google will never allow it.

Yes, but I don't see a difference between this and Steam on PC. An appstore is just an easy way to download apps. Steam can make a special homepage on Steam PC + a badge + a free valve game for every gamer using the app, and the google interdiction will just be nothing.

It is expectations and habits. On Android devices, people expect to get applications from Play / Amazon stores rather than manually downloading and installing an apk. I expect that a supermajority of Android users by a huge margin would not even understand the concept of "download and install an application package" even though they do it every day on Windows. They see Android, they go to the app store for programs.

I have the amazon store installed, and I used to have another one as well. Google doesn't ban anything, just doesn't put it on Google Play.

Google cant ban apps. They do not have the ability. Sure, they can prevent it from going on their market, but nothing is stopping you from downloading an apk from anywhere (or making your own) and installing it.

I'm sure there's a presentation from Valve engineers in which they specifically talk about Linux as a staging post for porting to android.

Here's a reddit link that goes to the presentation slides but also has some comments from one of the presenters:

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1bnaoh/valves_...

There's a ridiculous game I found on Android store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airhoc.sti...

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