Some major Android games not working

Bug Reports
1

REPRODUCIBILITY: always
OS VERSION: 5.2.0.15
HARDWARE: JP 2026
UI LANGUAGE: English
REGRESSION: —

DESCRIPTION:

I tested some games, this was my results:

Angry Birds 2 & Clash of Clans worked just fine.

NIKKE crashes when downloading game files.
BrownDust II launches but gets stuck on first splash screen.
Zenless Zone Zero I get “device doesn’t match hardware requirement” warning and then crash/closes after that.
Wuthering Waves I got to the privacy check thing and a splash screen, after that it was just blank.
Endfield I got “Unable to initialize the Unity Engine Gfx API” error
NTE: Neverness to Everness it does ask for the google account but after that it just crashes after that

PRECONDITIONS:

most of the game requires microG for google account login

RESULT:

either not working at all, or error when launching, or will crash when start downloading game files

2

apparently NTE & NIKKE might be Anti-Cheat issue (maybe), but others should be fixable as it seems to be mainly just missing Vulkan / Extension failures issue

3

Interesting bug report. I remember having Blue Archive working on my Xperia 10 iii a long time ago.

But in the end I decided that these questionable games have no place on a privacy centric device.

If you want to play Android games you should just buy an Android device imho. AAS is only going to introduce latency and performance regressions.

4

The biggest problem here is that more and more games require Google Services Framework (GSF), which is a big no-go for development. Development is definitely going in the wrong direction for the user. Google is tightening the noose even further.

So we should focus on bringing games to native Sailfish OS and not continue to rely on monopolists.

2 Likes
5

Without a major publisher in the gaming industry that decides to specifically target Sailfish OS it has no chance to attract games, or any “known” software, really. On PC it took Valve over a decade to make Linux gaming viable, though still not by convincing anybody to port games but through pouring resources to develop Proton, and they could only do that because Steam became the de-facto standard for game distribution… something they get monopoly allegations for and sued over all the time, and within all the noise occasionally some allegations do turn out to be correct.

6

Yes list is long Fruit Ninja, Pokemon crashes when you start the catch. Fallout Shelter doesnt instal.

7

Just because certain game titles trigger anti-cheat or you dont care for the games or gaming in general isn’t a reason to dismiss the underlying technical bugs.

The whole point of this report isn’t just about playing specific games it was about identifying gaps in AppSupport. Fixing Vulkan extension errors, missing Gfx API calls, and proper GPU string passthrough doesn’t just benefit heavy games.

These same improvements will directly benefit high-performance productivity apps, 3D tools, navigation software, and the overall longevity of AppSupport.

If SailfishOS and AppSupport wants to evolve then resolving these translation layer edge cases is kind of essential, regardless if its about gaming

6 Likes
8

With SailfishOS, we are not limited to Android games only.

Some good example are something like these:

So it should be possible to get games from SteamOS and GOG working on SailfishOS as well.

3 Likes