A teardown of the most recent update to the Stadia Android app (version 2.19) has unearthed some details about upcoming features and the possibility of playing certain games for a limited time. Support for non-certified phones also appears to be in the works along with a new "touch gamepad" with on-screen buttons.

According to 9to5Google, the Stadia app shows signs that Google will let games be played for free for limited periods of time with references to trials, demos, and free weekends. If you want to see how a game performs on Stadia before shelling out for it, this will be super useful, assuming publishers make use of it. Some of this free trial content may be exclusive to Stadia Pro subscribers, however. There are also nods to several future sales events, including a summer sale, back to school sale, holiday/end of year sale, and the big one: Black Friday.

While you can use a third-party Chrome extension to get on-screen Stadia controls working on an Android phone, there's currently no official support for it in the Stadia app. That looks to be changing in the near future, with controller button mapping or just straight-up touch controls on the way, depending on the game. Whether this will be a good experience is debatable, of course. New mentions of party chat have also been found, but who knows when that will eventually roll out to users.

Support for Stadia on phones is still pretty limited (see the full list here), partly because devices need to be certified to ensure they perform well enough. It looks as though non-certified phones will be allowed to use the service in the future, albeit with a warning that the experience may not be stellar. Even then, it seems that only phones that the Stadia it team is currently developing support for will be permitted — think of it as beta support or an experiment.

We don't really know when any of these features will land for sure, but some of them shouldn't be too far away. If you're a Stadia Pro subscriber, this month's free games are now available, including SUPERHOT, Panzer Dragoon: Remake, Little Nightmares, and Get Packed.

If Stadia 2.19 isn't yet available to you through the Play Store, you download it from APK Mirror.

Source: 9to5Google