Google Stadia has been expanding a lot lately, but the cloud streaming service has one major caveat for a lot of gamers — it doesn’t work on iOS. A custom browser by the name of “Stadium” enabled Stadia support on iPhone and iPad, but Apple quickly removed it. Now, the app is back!
Zachary Knox, the developer behind Stadium, tonight revealed that the app is back with version 1.2. This latest version was approved by Apple and is now live in the App Store for all to download.
However, there’s a bit of a catch. This new version of Stadium may not act quite as stable as the previous version if you’re using a Bluetooth controller. Now, instead of connecting different iOS APIs in a way Apple took issue with, Stadium uses one custom user agent to get Stadia to work and then overrides it after to allow the gamepad to work.
This new method of connecting gamepads should work, but sometimes iOS won’t play nicely with Stadia through the Stadium browser. Knox says that it does work, but sometimes it fails.
Bluetooth controllers might work. Using the “Override User Agent” I mentioned, Stadia should properly support the Gamepad API, but iOS doesn’t always seem to pass that through. I have gotten it to work more than once, but definitely not every time I tried.
That’s certainly unfortunate, especially because it means that users who already had the previous version of the app may be updated automatically to this new, not quite as stable version. On the bright side, the Stadia Controller should still work perfectly fine as it bypasses Bluetooth altogether.
You can download Stadium from the App Store now. To get the app running, you’ll need to follow Knox’s full instructions.
