Apple’s iPhones may just kill my favorite niche phone brand

Apple announced a new Games app coming with iOS 26 — and at first glance, it might not look like a big deal. But after thinking about it for a bit… I’m starting to sweat for my beloved niche gaming phone: the Asus ROG Phone.

So, what is this Games app? Essentially, it’s a game launcher that can be navigated with a connected controller — turning your iPhone into a portable console experience. It comes with an easy discover section, news updates on game seasons and limited-time events, and even a social layer: high score comparisons, friend challenges, and party/game invites are all baked in.

That’s it? A simple Games app?

Look, a Games app isn’t a revolution — but it adds just the right layer of polish. One of my personal complaints about iPhones for gaming was the lack of a dedicated mode — no way to lock brightness or block notifications that ruin your clutch win.

To be fair, there is a Gaming Focus mode among the many Do Not Disturb modes that Apple introduced with iOS 15 in 2021. You can set it up to block notifications, prioritize specific apps or contacts, et cetera.

But you still need to activate Gaming Focus manually, and remember to deactivate it when you are done gaming. Alternatively, you can do a deep dive and set iOS up yourself, to automatically start Gaming Mode when you open a specific app. Again, you need to remember to do this every time you install a new game.

Android phones, on the other hand, typically recognize games and put them in their game launcher, which does everything for you automatically. Ironically, that’s a more Apple-ish approach.

Secondly, Focus Mode doesn’t stop the phone’s auto-brightness from fluctuating, and that can be a problem when you are claw-gripping the phone in a sweaty deathmatch. Having your brightness drop during a duel is a pain point!

If Apple is looking to make things just right, it should be planning to include these and make them automatic in the Games launcher.

Also worth noting: at WWDC 2025, Apple put a lot of emphasis on Sony controllers — it looks like a partnership might be brewing. Could this mean future games will ship with controller-first support? Could we see more PlayStation titles ported to iOS? If so, Android is in real trouble.

Apple is making an actual push into gaming. And for ROG Phones, this is bad news

I’ve been an ROG Phone fan for years. The series always had phenomenal hardware — sensitive screens, ultrasonic shoulder buttons, fan extensions, top-class speakers. It really does feel like a handheld console at times. But my biggest gripe has never been the hardware. It’s Android itself.

No matter how powerful the device, the Android platform simply doesn’t have a robust library of high-quality games. Yes, we’ve seen slow progress — titles like Call of Duty Mobile, Genshin Impact, Diablo Immortal, the new Delta Force, and Arena Breakout.

However, these were mostly developed from the ground up as mobile titles, and do come with that certain mobile game feel. Specifically the multiple layers of menus that are designed to be confusing, special currencies, and the comparatively shallow gameplay.

By comparison, iOS is leaps and bounds ahead. It’s getting true console-level games — ones that were originally made for the PS, Xbox, and PC:

• While Apple got Assassin’s Creed: Mirage and will be getting Shadows, Android is still stuck with the Funko Pop edition (Assassin’s Creed Rebellion).
• Resident Evil Village launched on iDevices with an A17 Pro or M-class chips, and is a technically impressive feat. The same goes for RE4: Remake.
• Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding is available on iOS/iPadOS, with absolutely no word or mention of plans to bring it to Android.

Now, all is not perfect. These ports may target 30 FPS, which they may or may not hit. And, generally, touch controls don’t agree with them very well, and it’s recommended to have a controller — that’s the downside when a game hasn’t been developed as a mobile title from the ground up. Or, it just shows that these developers are yet inexperienced with the platform — touchscreen gaming is very, very new to them.

But it shows that there’s a genuine push from Apple in that direction, and things are just now ramping up. For example — Cupertino bought its first-ever gaming studio recently. Granted, developer RAC7 is mostly a two-man operation, but it did push out the super-successful Apple Arcade game Sneaky Sasquatch. Obviously, Apple is in its first steps of a pretty hard push into gaming.

Ironically, Android had the chance to be ahead in this game

Here’s the ironic twist. Android was first to getting an actual console game ported to it way back in 2016! Back then, Nvidia had the vision of creating a tablet for gamers. The Nvidia Shield was launched in 2015, and as a push to be “taken seriously”, Nvidia struck some sort of exclusive deal with Konami.

As a result, the excellent Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance was available on the Play Store! It was followed by MGS 2 and MGS 3 in 2017!

Now, since this was an exclusive deal, you couldn’t download the games on a device other than the Nvidia Shield.

But still, it very much showed that it’s possible to port such games to Google’s operating system, so long as there was an initiative behind it.

Ironically and sadly, since the Nvidia Shield is a dead product and the exclusive contracts are gone, these games are simply gone from the Play Store now, instead of living on a fruitful life. You can’t possibly tell me that today’s flagship smartphones can not run what a tablet from 2015 could.

To further drive the point that this is not far-fetched — the excellent video editing app LumaFusion has been on iOS since 2016, and it took for Samsung to partner up with the developer for the app to finally arrive to Android — in 2023. The added bonus is that LumaFusion is not exclusive to Samsung devices right now, so you can go ahead and download it to benefit from that partnership, even if not on a Samsung phone.

So what needs to happen?

ASUS needs to act fast. The ROG Phone line has been drifting toward “mainstream flagship with LED lights on the back” — which waters down its niche appeal. In my opinion, the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate was the last true gaming beast from the company. Time to circle back and double down on what made the brand special.



Secondly, Android needs to catch up in the premium games department. Maybe Asus can leverage some connections and make some sort of partnership like the aforementioned examples. Ideally, that’d be done by Google, but let’s face it — Google is kind of busy with and going all-hands on AI right now.

Ideally, Google would be the one to make the step and entire premium publisher and developers.

But Google is over-invested in pouring resources into AI — which may or may not be the right call long-term. But in the short term, it means that iOS 26 could very well kill my favorite niche phone brand. Which would be a shame, as the ROG Phones have been THE de-facto gamer phone for so many years now.