Honestly if I can play all of the new indie games on my phone I don't really care whether or not they're "android games."
By your logic the steam deck doesn't have any games since most of them rely on proton to work.
Zangoose
joined 2 years ago
There are android apps combining fex/box64 with proton in order to run full Windows games now. Android may actually be a semi-viable gaming platform in the near future.
GameNative is one that works as a full steam client but there are a few others that give you more control like Winlator (both on GitHub)
You can actually play games pretty decently on them, especially indies like hollow knight and Celeste.
So is the line you're drawing the emulation layer needed between ARM and x86? Or is it the difference between emulation and translation?
If this exact same fex+proton software was run on a snapdragon laptop under Ubuntu is that really that different? Do you count apps running under Java bytecode as emulation? Because that's a vast majority of android apps. The distinction between translation, native gaming, and emulation is ultimately kind of meaningless if you get a good experience out of it.
Android is technically Linux under the hood, so it can (and has) been making use of the improvements to Linux gaming.
If by "android gaming" you mean you want to see a world where games are published to the play store in addition to Steam and consoles, you should probably give up on that. The play store is too ridden with actual malware to make that a reality. Even if games got released there, people would complain that they aren't free because all of their other phone games are. If you want to play games on your phone with a Bluetooth controller and get a decent experience, it's already here.