You may havenoticed moreandmore handheld contenton the site, as gaming handhelds are a growing field Android is very much a part. This means we are regularly testingall manner of gaming productsand apps, andValve’s Steam mobile appis very much a key part of that, which is why it was immediately apparent the app is horribly horribly broken, and has been for at least four weeks.
Handheld consoles are leaving gaming phones in the dust
I can purchase a Steam Deck and a mid-range Android for less than a gaming phone
Reviews on the Play Store are down to a 2.3 rating for Android’s Steam app, which is incredibly low. Each review calls out the issue: the app won’t boot. Having tested this ourselves, we can confirm there is something currently wrong with Android’s Steam app, and seemingly, Valve has yet to acknowledge the issue, let alone fix it.
Users are angry across the Steam forums and Play Store
Jump on over to the Steam forums, and things are just as dire as Steam’s Play Store reviews. There are countless posts asking what is wrong with the Android app, asking why it won’t boot,dating back to at least March 26th, with comments saying the issue predates that (the Android app was updated on the 19th, likely the culprit). While it’s not completely clear when the issue officially started, it’s definitely still a problem halfway into April. Worse yet, the app is often used as a two-factor authenticator with Steam Guard, which doesn’t work when the app won’t even boot past a grey screen.
Some users claim deleting the Android app and reinstalling it can help you get logged back in. We have tried this and were able to get the Steam app to boot once, but every time after that resulted in the familiar grey screen, which lines up with user reports that discovered similar.
How things look right now
Having kept a close eye on the issue all weekend, whether the Steam app boots or not appears to be totally random. At times, it will try to load and show the majority of the UI, where you can get some functionality out of it, like utilizing Steam Guard while the store itself refuses to load. At other times, nothing will appear on the screen at all. Seemingly, there is no quick fix to the current issues plaguing the Steam Android app; the problem appears to be server-side, which means it is up to Valve to fix it. AP has reached out to Valve for comment to ask why this is taking so long to fix and why users have not been notified of the problem.
