OK... deep breath... Android updated Steam Mobile for me yesterday.

tl;dr: I experienced almost all issues described on the new complaint topics on the Steam Mobile discussions forum on steam. Check them out before you update!

Not only is this new app slooooow... I freaking hated the new design, and it's beta state at best.

It is less coherent with Steam's desktop app and website appearance than the old design. The notifications are grey while most elements elsewhere are blue.

The notification page uses an unusually big font size so it fits very few notifications on a single page. This is less of a problem because they changed from a paged to a rolling list, but still makes them look alien with everything else. Click on a discussions notification and you'll be thrown to blue small-font tight-spaced webpages looking exactly like the old layout, navigate and you might be thrown back at the old notifications list or discussion posts list because breadcrumbs are broken.

Despite the big font, reading notifications is a chore, because of low contrast color choices and the only hint that each notification is of a different nature is a particularly midgrey-colored text, so it isn't easy at all to notice at a glance.

The news section, the in-app notifications section and the community discussions have poorly handled overlaps (defaulting to maximal overlapping, so you see the same fuzzy content mix everywhere. It's ok to offer a flow somewhere as a new option, but what if I DO want to go here for forum posts and there for Valve's official news? That possibility of a more ordered navigation is seemingly ruined or burried.

There is a bottom menu AND a hamburger rollg with sub-items AND a side menu AND a top side-swipe.

Speaking of swipes... more often than not swiping makes this thing bounce back and even go in the oposite direction from the intended. It's maddening!

Hangs and failures to load page is also way more frequent now (and it was pretty unreliable before).

On the Library, the filter "Installed on Computer X" just lists all my games.

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AFAIK there are even provider-agnostic methods for this sort of thing, but anything beyond smartphone as token is a rare beast to see actually implemented nowadays, let alone a real agnostic implementation.

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Quoting: Termy

Quoting: Marlockhttps://store.steampowered.com/mobile [External Link]

care to elaborate how that link is related to my question? At least i can't find any word about an updater function there...

It's a place you can download the apk file (a known good and updated version) manually. If you do that you can install it over the current version. Works more reliably than Aurora.

Doesn't seem to have any auto-update method though.

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That's what happens when the easiest to break and easiest to loose and easiest to hack device (a smartphone) becomes a de-facto standard replacement for e-Token devices...

You can, however, make the app run only when explicitly opened. It will still be logged-in when you open it, but won't eat your battery and resources or nag you otherwise.

Android allows this, despite making sure it's hidden and hard to get it right. In android's configs go to applications. In the list of installed apps that should appear, go to the steam mobile app to open its settings (not the in-app ones, the android system standard ones). Disable all notifications, disable auto-start, disable app permissions, change the power settings to restrict background activity.

It's now a dead paperweight until openend.

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Here is one more bit about "fetch driver installer from manufacturer website"

We do have that option on Linux if the manufacturer goes through the trouble of making such an installer.

Nvidia does, yet here is what they say about it:
https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/193764/en-us/ [External Link]

Note that many Linux distributions provide their own packages of the NVIDIA Linux Graphics Driver in the distribution's native package management format. This may interact better with the rest of your distribution's framework, and you may want to use this rather than NVIDIA's official package.

AMD offers their proprietary linux driver this way too (but it's worse than Mesa for gaming).

Indeed the most recommended Nvidia driver PPA for Ubuntu (ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa) is still offering versions up to 515, not including 520.
https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa [External Link]

But be careful because the newest major version number currently on offer by Nvidia iis usually the testing branch, while the stable branch uses a smaller major version number... and they even have a 3rd branch just for Vulkan new stuff.

520 is showing only on the "New Feature Branch" here:
https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us# [External Link]

LLB / SLB
Production Branch drivers provide ISV certification and optimal stability and performance for Unix customers. This driver is most commonly deployed at enterprises, providing support for the sustained bug fix and security updates commonly required.

New Feature Branch drivers provide early adopters and bleeding edge developers access to the latest driver features before they are integrated into the Production Branches

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Quoting: TermyAnyone knows if the standalone apk has an updater? Aurora Store being finnicky as it is i tend to avoid playstore stuff as much as possible...

https://store.steampowered.com/mobile [External Link]

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Let me also take one thing off my chest:

Downloading a driver installer .exe from the GPU manufacturer website is a HORRIBLE user experience compared to adding a PPA, even if the driver control panel warns you of a newer version and offers the correct download url (instead of the more common situation where the entire thing is manual).

I should know... I had SERIOUS issues with windows drivers including but not limited to running driver updates for a Sapphire HD 7770 (AMD) GPU on Win7. Updates didn't apply cleanly over older versions of the driver, so you had to uninstall the previous driver first... and the uninstaller didn't really remove everything so you had to use 3rd-party cleaner apps... and those also didn't catch 100% of the mess so at some point I discovered that Microsoft wasn't satisfied with the Windows Registry and had created ANOTHER even more cryptic repository for system configs (which I don't even remember the name anymore... IIRC it wasn't group policies but maybe) and AMD thought it was a good idea to use that.

Anyway, this was such a poor user experience that moving to linux and wrestling with Radeon (the legacy opensource driver) was a relief and this was before Valve threw money at all our problems.

Adding a PPA then using the Update Manager to check, fetch and apply updates for the entire OS plus all apps is waaaaay better than installer.exe from website and even better than Windows Updates sluggish downloads, cumulative updates ordering issues, consecutive reboots, unreliability, haphazard 3rd-party GUIs for each 3rd-party app update, etc.

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the perks of disabling auto-updates on google play store...

I have time to decide when it's safe to click the update button.

For my usage, so far the benefits don't seem all that big and the issues seem significant

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Kisak is one of Valve's linux devs, working on upstream Mesa.

Having an LTS distro is *partially* uncaracterized by adding Kisak Mesa PPA... it does bring in a newer than officially curated component to the OS, but only that one and not the whole mass of core components that the LTS freezes when released. This limits the amount of issues derived from updating packages to a minimum, and makes it much easier to guess if the PPA is or isn't involved.

If that's the only PPA you need, you know graphics issues that arise my stem from it and that removing it and reversing Mesa to the default Ubuntu version is a useful test to fix graphics issues.

This does open the door to "PPA Hell" where a user adds many PPAs and a few of them provide an overlapping selection of packages with conflicting version requirements in that overlap. Reliable PPA sources are careful to avoid putting too much stuff in a single PPA to prevent such overlaps, but there are some examples otherwise.

However most often than not a PPA breaks the system just because it pushed a buggy new version of a package (Oibaf, I'm looking at you!) and this happens to rolling-release distros too.

Also keep in mind that for gaming on Ubuntu LTS, Mesa is the only PPA that Valve themselves recommend going for a newer than default version, and then only if you want to enjoy the latest features they contributed upstream.

It's not a hard requirement anymore, not like when Valve first started getting their hands dirty with the linux graphics stack. Most of their essential contribuitions are already contributed upstream to Mesa and Kernel devs AND pulled downstream into Ubuntu LTS too.

If you think this is too much, it's ok... that's why I like the fact that we have so many good distros! But IMHO it doesn't really make our lives difficult on non-rolling distros if we need a couple things that aren't there by default.

ps: I'm a casual gamer using Linux Mint without any PPA and Steam and Proton work just fine here. I haven't even moved from Linux Mint 20.x to 21, so my distro is based off Ubuntu 20.04, not 22.04, and that's still enough to get things going just fine here.

I also experimentally enabled Kisak PPA on one of my machines and left it there, with Mint's auto-update feature enabled, and the PPA updates are auto-applied without issue (it's been ~1 year since the experiment started).

I don't recommend Oibaf, it's been the source of several threads on the "Steam on Linux" discussion forum on Steam. Kisak on the other hand has almost never (... ... ... maybe actually never?!!) been pinpointed as the source of an issue there.

Oibaf does make it clear that his PPA is on the more experimental side, and Kisak does make it clear his is more on the safe side, so all is as it should.

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The current Steam Mobile app did have chat, despite the separate app existing and being more feature-complete... I use only the Steam Mobile messaging because the chat app has issues on my phone.

Will this update remove the simple chat message features entirely ir is it still there in its minimal form?

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