The session now belongs to a foreground service rather than the activity.
Android demotes a process as soon as its last visible activity goes and the
low-memory killer reaps the guest, so leaving Big Picture to answer a message
came back to a dead Steam; the service holds the process at perceptible
priority, a partial wake lock keeps the CPU from dropping the guest's threads,
and a high-performance WiFi lock keeps a backgrounded download from being
throttled to nothing. The notification is silent (IMPORTANCE_LOW), carries a
Stop action, and returns to the session when tapped. Back now puts the app away
and leaves Steam running; a swipe out of recents ends the session.
The compositor moved with it: it is process-wide, started once, and merely
swaps the Surface it presents into as the activity comes and goes.
Package is com.steamdeck.launcher, signed with the AOSP testkey (v1+v2+v3) so
every build installs over the last one, and CI asserts all three schemes.
The launcher icon is our own controller on a purple glow — the spirit of the
Steam tile the client entry uses, none of its geometry.
The repo is private, so each run is billed. Three caches now carry a rebuild:
Gradle's own through setup-gradle (dependencies, build cache, configuration
cache), the CMake/ninja tree keyed on the C sources and the NDK, and the two
cross-compiled preloads — the last of which also skips installing the cross
toolchain, since a run that changes only Kotlin has no reason to touch a C
compiler. Superseded pushes are cancelled, documentation pushes do not build,
and the apk is stored rather than recompressed.
The preload assertions moved from the cross binutils to readelf, which reads
any ELF whatever the host, so they keep running on a cache hit.
Credits name The412Banner and maxjivi05: the runtime under all of this is
Max's gamescope work from WinNative.
Lifts Bannerlator's Linux/gamescope runtime out into an app of its own: the
Wayland compositor, the proot session, the runtime installer, the fake-evdev
controller path and the PulseAudio server, with none of the Wine, container or
store machinery around them.
One activity installs the runtime from the same winlator-contents catalog and a
second one runs the session: compositor on a SurfaceView, gamescope and Valve's
native arm64 client under proot, a physical pad republished into the fake-input
rings, and the session's milestones on screen until the first frame arrives.
The412Banner