Google Stadia as a service has grown a fair bit since it was first launched almost two years ago, but the Android app has always lagged behind. All the platforms that are supported by Stadia have featured voice chat and party chat for a while, except for the Android app, for some reason. It’s got to the point where people would rather use the web app on Android because it supports chat, but that won’t be necessary anymore. The Android app is finally righting this wrong.
Support for both of these features has supposedly been in the works for a very long time, but Google has never quite finished adding it to the app. That’s now changing. 9to5Google reports that both of the long-gone Stadia features have now made their way to the Android app — party chat and in-game voice chat. The presence of voice chat has also been reported on Reddit.
While a support page was spotted a few days ago hinting at voice chat coming to Android soon, it’s now finally live, together with party chats and the ability to create a party, invite people, and send messages. What’s more, you can continue to use your phone while in party chat. Stadia will place a notification in your tray labeled “Party voice chat,” with simple links to returning to the party view and muting your microphone.
For voice chat, you’ll be able to see an in-app pop-up saying that your headset is now connected, followed by another pop-up after entering a game saying that game chat is available. Like other platforms where Stadia is supported, the in-game settings allow you to switch from “Game chat” or “None right now” to enable/disable game chat.
As we stressed before, this is huge news for people playing Stadia on their mobile devices. Stadia’s social features on Android have been lacking since launch, so this is long overdue. Now, the Stadia experience on Android is a little bit more complete.
You can download the latest version of the Stadia app from the Google Play Store right now.
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