Google detailing the ‘more technically intricate aspects’ of Stadia, starting wi...

Google detailing the ‘more technically intricate aspects’ of Stadia, starting with Controller setup

Since its inception, Google has maintained a Stadia Dev blog to make announcements about new tools, features, programs, and partnerships. The Stadia team is now using it to cover the cloud streaming platform’s technical aspects with an eye towards achieving “simplicity in a world of complexities for our end users.”

Google’s first entry for this series on the Stadia Dev blog talks about “building Stadia Controller setup in our mobile app with Flutter.”

At first glance, setting up the Stadia Controller might appear to be a relatively straightforward process. The user needs to turn the controller on, use the Stadia mobile app to find and connect to the controller via Bluetooth, send it Wi-Fi credentials, and then start playing.

Of course, conditions aren’t always ideal given the “thousands of different phones and Wi-Fi routers.” Possible technical failures include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) getting disrupted by signal noise and strength. Other failure points include:

A user’s phone might have an unreliable antenna. A controller might be low on battery, or lose power in the middle of setup. A user might background the app, or turn Bluetooth off during setup. A Wi-Fi router might not connect to the controller. The controller might have a mandatory software update that fails to install correctly. These are all examples of issues that could be accounted for in a hardware setup flow.

Besides “Reliability,” “Correctness” and “Approachability” were other tentpoles that the team had in mind. 

More about Google Stadia:

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