Yeah, especially since I know I likely wouldn’t play it much.
On the other hand, if it was free (also as in money) and open-source, and I liked it, I could donate. Although I don’t have much money, so probably just smaller amounts, better than the 0 I do right now by not gaming instead.
For example, I absolutely wouldn’t pay $9.60 for Binary Eye (barcode/2D code scanner app) if it cost that much, but as a donation that was fine.
Well, I could make an exception for games on physical media. I like it, and it has resale value.
Or just something like Termux, a terminal emulator for Android. Example screenshot (XFCE desktop over VNC server), I didn’t know what to fit in there: https://files.catbox.moe/zr7kem.png
Full desktop apps, running natively under Android. For better compatibility Termux also has proot-distro (similar to chroot) where you can have… let me copy-paste
Though there is apparently some performance hit. I just prefer Android, but maybe you could run even full LibreOffice under some distro this way.
If it can be done by Termux, then someone like Samsung could definitely make something like that too, but integrated with the system and with more software available in their repos.
What’s missing from the picture but is interesting too is NGINX server (reverse proxy, lazy file sharing, wget mirrored static website serving), kiwix-serve (serving ZIM files including the entire Wikipedia from SD card) and Navidrome (music server).
And brought to any internet-connected computer via Cloudflare QuickTunnel (because it doesn’t need account nor domain name). The mobile data upload speed will finally matter, a lot.
You get the idea, GNU+Linux. And Android already has the Linux kernel part.
I was hoping that eventually smartphones would evolve to do everything. Especially when things like Samsung Dex were intorduced, it looked to me like maybe in the future phones could replace desktops, running a full desktop OS when docked and some simplified mobile UI + power saving when in mobile mode.