With the rise of mobile and cloud games, Google wants to finally improve the controller drone situation on Android. Currently, if you connect a game controller to your Android device via USB or via Bluetooth, chances are it will not vibrate as it does during a console. This is because Android offers only minimal support for vibrating paired input devices – it’s on or off. After announcing in October that the company is considering adding proper junk support, we’ve now noticed the code commitments that allow for improved noise for game control.
When we first highlighted this issue in October, we originally noticed that Android does not have an API to generate vibrations on external devices such as a paired game controller. This does not seem to be entirely true, as Switch-hacker and emulator dev regulations have shown us that Android does provide rudimentary support for vibrating external connections. The problem with the current implementation is that developers can not control the amplitude of vibrations or generate custom vibration effects on paired devices, leading to subtle haptic feedback. As things stand now, it is better to have no haptic feedback than poor haptic feedback.
Fortunately, Google finally decided to address this issue a few months ago, and its engineers have made commitments to AOSP to improve support for the rumbling of the feeder. The code changes provide support for amplitude control and pave the way for generating generated vibration effects. Not all game controllers will be supported, as the gamepad driver must support power feedback under Linux, but a majority of game controllers must work. It will be useful to support rumble in games designed for it, which includes many console games accessible to mobile gamers through cloud gaming services, such as Google’s own Stadia, NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW, Microsoft’s xCloud, and more.
Since these connections have not been merged yet, we do not know if the improved rumble of the game controller will move to Android 12.. However, it is possible that this feature has already been merged internally and that Google is only now uploading the links to the public AOSP repo. Alternatively, Google can merge these changes within the next few days or weeks so that the changes have enough time to spread to Android 12.
Featured image: the ASUS ROG Phone 3 with the ROG Kunai 3 game controller