A rejected PR, 24 days to 254 stars: how MaliBridge caught the people DroidDeck turned away

In 2026 Oct 10, ASEbrahim, a GitHub account created in February with no prior work, opened a PR titled "Mali bridge" on DroidDeck, then the hottest open-source Android project. The maintainers found it too big to review and didn't merge it. Another maintainer, leegao, suggested making it a standalone layer. Three days later, on Oct 13, MaliBridge was created as its own repo. By Nov 6 it had 254 stars, 18 releases, and about 18.7k downloads. On Nov 3, DroidDeck's maintainers merged the code back into the main branch. This piece covers where its stars came from, and whether you can get your own using the same approach.

What it is

DroidDeck is an open-source Android app that launched in Sep 24. It runs the official Steam client plus Proton on a phone, essentially putting a Steam Deck in your pocket. It gained 18.2k stars in 6 weeks (GitHub, 11-06), and Android Authority and Tom's Guide both covered it. But its README is explicit: only Qualcomm Adreno 730 and newer are supported, and "Mali, Xclipse, and PowerVR are not supported."

Mali is Arm's GPU. It's used in MediaTek Dimensity, Google Tensor, Xiaomi's XRING, and older Exynos chips, including flagships like the Galaxy Tab S10+/S11 Ultra and Pixel 8/9. MaliBridge is a Vulkan bridge that lets DroidDeck render on these GPUs using the phone's built-in driver, with no third-party driver flashing required. You install an APK called DroidDeck Mali and you're playing. The first line of the repo's homepage reads: "Play Steam and PC games on Android phones and tablets with a Mali GPU... It is free."

The author tested 36 games on two Samsung tablets. Half-Life 2 ran at about 94 fps, and Silksong, Stardew Valley, and Dark Souls Remastered were all playable. Players then reported results from 32 other Mali devices. The compatibility table in the README now covers 93 games, 50 of which are rated "playable or better."

How the stars grew

Daily GitHub stars. The curve is flat, with no single day of explosive growth. It wasn't driven by a big account reposting it. It accumulated slowly, a dozen or two per day.

Downloads far outnumber stars. From the GitHub Releases page 11-06: before v0.4 in Oct 15, each release had only single-digit to a few dozen downloads. From v0.5.1 in Oct 19, each release had thousands. v0.5.4.2 alone had 6,116 downloads, and v0.5.5.2, released three days ago, already has 4,386. That means roughly one in every 70 people who downloaded it came back to star it. For this kind of "tool" project, stars naturally run about an order of magnitude below usage.

Where the users come from

First, the upstream issue thread. DroidDeck has an issue #218 opened in Oct 4, "Add support for PanVK Mali GPU drivers?", with 150 comments. Everyone who wanted DroidDeck on Mali gathered there. The author posted 16 comments, directly replying to people with G720 and G925 devices, sharing test results, and pointing them to their Releases page. Several of the README's "player reports" link straight to comments in #218, for example a POCO X6 Pro user's report of "GTA San Andreas and Burnout Paradise at about 30 fps." This was the main source, and it was precise traffic: everyone who arrived had a Mali device and had been turned away by the official team.

Second, Reddit device and emulator posts. The author's post titles were all "Game X running on Device Y": "Dark Souls 3 running on my Tab S11 Ultra" and "Sekiro on my Tab S11 Ultra" on r/GalaxyTab, "ULTRAKILL on a Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra" on r/SBCGaming, and also posted to r/EmulationOnAndroid. On r/EmulationMediatekMali, users were already recommending it on their own: "DroidDeck for mali called MaliBridge? It works very well." I couldn't get the upvote or comment counts for these posts.

Third, short video and the Chinese-language community, small in scale. The YouTube channel @malibridge has 64 subscribers and 14 videos, with about 3,900 total views. The top one is a RE2 Short with 1,312 views (YouTube, 11-06). The README has a Chinese version linking to a Bilibili tutorial, and Chinese-language threads like "epic Dimensity usage issues" and "keyboard and mouse controls" have appeared in the discussions. Many forks have Chinese account names, suggesting the large pool of Dimensity phone users (Xiaomi, vivo, OPPO, iQOO) is starting to find it.

Fourth, keeping people around. Beta testing and help requests run through Discord, and the app has a "Send logs to MaliBridge" button so players can send logs to the author in one tap. 24 releases in 18 days, and nearly every report got a reply and was added to the compatibility table. Users had a reason to come back for the next release every two or three days, which is why each of the last two versions drew several thousand downloads.

What's missing: No media outlet has covered it on its own. Searching "MaliBridge" or "DroidDeck Mali" on X over the past 30 days returns 0 posts, and searching TikTok turns up no related videos.

Why this one

Plenty of people are working on "PC games on Mali," but they're each going their own way:

On the narrow path of "the real Steam client plus the phone's stock driver," it was the first one that actually played. What users wanted was one line: "the DroidDeck experience, but on my Dimensity or Pixel." The jdmg28 project, which came 4 days earlier, lost on playability; the others lost on approach.

But this path is also reaching its limit quickly. The DroidDeck maintainers have already merged it into the main branch (PR #2027, keeping the author's commits). The author wrote in the README: "Official DroidDeck doesn't include MaliBridge yet; once it does, its releases are fine too." Once the official release ships, the reason to install DroidDeck Mali separately disappears. leegao has also forked a Vulkan-layer version so other projects can reuse it. MaliBridge is likely to shift from a product into a component, and its star growth will probably slow (inference).

Can you follow it?

Doing the same thing now means arriving late: Mali is already claimed by it, and upstream has absorbed it. In DroidDeck's commit history, people are already adding PowerVR and Samsung Xclipse support (GitHub, 11-06), and the remaining spots on the "not supported" list are being filled.

What's worth learning is how it earned stars, which can be applied to other hot projects:

1. Find an open-source project that just went viral and explicitly says "X not supported." The hardware, OS, language, or platform it leaves out is a group of people locked out who will actively search for a solution.
2. Submit upstream first, and if it's rejected, go standalone. Rejection gives you a legitimate reason to build a separate repo, and upstream maintainers may even point you in a direction.
3. Reply one by one in the most-commented feature request upstream. Don't just drop an ad link. Answer specific people about their specific devices and post concrete test results.
4. Turn the README into a table of "does my device work, and how many fps." Each user report becomes a row of content and a reason for the next person to star it.
5. Frequent small releases plus one-tap feedback. Give people a reason to come back.
6. Bilingual, Chinese and English. Chinese users are the largest pool for many hardware platforms.

If it were you

Verdict: C. This specific opportunity is closed, but the playbook is worth remembering for the next "hot open-source project + explicit 'not supported'" moment. Don't expect a big star count: 24 stars in 254 days came from a very narrow, precisely targeted audience, not a path you can copy to reach tens of thousands of stars.

Who it's for: Developers who know the low-level stuff (graphics, drivers, system compatibility layers), who have one or two target devices they can test on themselves, and who watch GitHub trending and can spot what a project is missing within the first two weeks it goes viral.

Who it's not for: Anyone who wants tens of thousands of stars and big fame (this kind of project's ceiling is the users of the parent project who got shut out); anyone unwilling to answer issues and Discord every day (half its stars come from service); people who only write app-layer code and can't build a compatibility layer.

How to do it: Each week, scan the GitHub projects that gained the most stars over the last 30 days. Check the README and issue tracker for "not supported" or "doesn't work on" requests with over a hundred comments. Pick one where you have the device and the skill to fill the gap. Submit a PR upstream first. If it's rejected or ignored, spin up your own repo and ship a usable first version within a week.

How to get users: The popular upstream issue is the first channel, replying to each person with specifics. The second is the target device's subreddit, with titles like "Game X / feature Y running on device Z." The third is hands-on demo videos on Bilibili and YouTube Shorts. The first screen of the README is a compatibility table.

When to be early: Within a month before the parent project takes off. The window lasts as long as it takes upstream to fill the gap itself. MaliBridge went from repo creation to merged into main in just 21 days.

What would mean you read it wrong: ① Once the official DroidDeck release ships Mali support, if MaliBridge's stars are still growing by more than 100 a week, that means an independent project's reputation can stick, and this path is worth more than it looks. ② Conversely, if it stops updating soon after the official release and its stars flatten, that would show this kind of "bridge" value gets absorbed upstream. Then treat it as a stepping stone to build a track record and get into upstream maintainer circles, not as a project that will hold stars long-term.