As you’d expect, voice chat lets players talk to each other while gaming. If the feature is live for you, an in-app pop-up will notify you that your headset is now connected. Another pop-up will follow once you start a game, telling you that game chat is available. You will be able to enable/disable game chat from Stadia’s in-game settings menu. Like other platforms where Stadia is supported, you have two options on Android as well: “Game chat” and “None right now.”
The Stadia Android app is gaining full-fledged support for party chat as well. You can create a party, invite others to it, send text and voice messages, and share the link to your party via other apps. Your party chat will remain active in the background even if you’re using some other app on your phone. A “Party voice chat” notification in the notification tray will let you quickly return to your party whenever you want. You will also be able to turn off the mic/voice chat from this notification, without opening the app.
Stadia now supports voice chat and party chat on Android
Two years into launch, Android is arguably the worst supported platform by Google’s cloud gaming service Stadia. Pretty much every other platform has supported voice chat and party chat on Stadia for a while now but, for reasons best known to Google, the company failed to bring these features to its own OS for the longest time. Party chat was first spotted in development for Android in May last year but it took forever to arrive. In the meantime, Google launched a PWA (progressive web app) for iOS complete with party chat and streaming in December last year. The same PWA also arrived on Android a few months back. Surprisingly, it offered a better experience than the native Stadia Android app. Google finally gave us some hope when it added a support page explaining how voice chat will work on the Stadia app for Android. Days later, both voice chat and party chat are live for Android Stadia gamers. These two additions make the Stadia experience on Android a lot better and bring it closer to a full console gaming experience. Click the button below to download the latest version of the Stadia app for Android from the Google Play Store. DOWNLOAD STADIA
