Google’s game streaming service, Google Stadia is yet to make its arrival in a lot of places including India, but it seems the company is pushing for a wider-feature set before a wider rollout commences. According to an APK teardown of the latest Stadia app by 9to5Google, there are a couple of new features that the Mountain View giant is working on.
Touchscreen Gamepad
As of right now, if you want to play Stadia games on your Pixel smartphone, you need to connect a controller to your phone — that’s not ideal. In fact, demand for having on-screen controls is apparently so high that there are third party apps that try and solve the problem.
Fortunately though, 9to5Google reports that Google itself is working on implementing touchscreen controls in the Stadia app. Strings found in the code also suggest that users will be able to adjust the size and layout of the buttons in the controller.
TouchGamepadLayoutConfig.PositionPlacement TouchGamepadLayoutConfig.DpadConfig TouchGamepadLayoutConfig.ButtonConfig TouchGamepadLayoutConfig.StickAreaConfig TouchGamepadLayoutConfig.CenterTopPlacement TouchGamepadLayoutConfig.StickAreaConfig.IdlePosition
Android TV Support
Another important piece of information spotted by the folks over at 9to5Google is evidence of Android TV support possibly coming to the Stadia app. This falls in line with rumours suggesting that Google will add Android TV support to Stadia this year.
The Stadia APK reportedly mentions support for the Android TV launcher and some more things hinting at upcoming support for Android TV.
As always, features spotted in APK teardown don’t necessarily make their way to release ready software. However, these features do seem like they should come to Stadia anyway, to make it reach its potential of being a gaming service that users can use anytime, anywhere.
