Large corporation power shows its ugly face after Steam for Android is released

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Published on Monday, 30 January 2012 08:40

Back on Thursday of last week, Valve released their official mobile app for Steam onto the Android Market. Since then just about every 3rd party Steam application that was on the Android Market previous to the official Steam application's release has been taken off of the market.

This includes one of the best ones that was released a couple of weeks before the official Steam application from Valve which was created by IBF Programs. In fact, before the official app was released, there were quite a decent amount of good ones on the market for people to use. Now there only seems to be one that survived called Staticon for Steam, most likely because it doesn't do some of what the official application does.

For those of you who have downloaded one of the other 3rd party Steam applications and happen to be using it aside from the official one, there is no word just yet on whether these apps will appear elsewhere. We are going to be reaching out to some of the developers to see if they will upload the apps to other markets like GetJar or SlideMe.

The rather disturbing part about all of this though is that the Steam API is publicly available for anyone to use and developer applications for people to use including on Android. Even though the Steam API is available, allowing people to make applications whether mobile or web-based, it seems as though that doesn't matter now that the official Steam application from Valve is available. The official Steam app was rumored to be coming a long time ago but it looks like it was hurried out once the IBF Programs application got released.

We will keep everyone updated on the status of the 3rd party apps for Steam and where, if at all, they will appear next.

Thanks to Sab for the tip!

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