The few of you who use physical controllers to game with your Android devices might have noticed that haptic feedback is kind of terrible at the moment. At the moment, Android doesn't have proper rumble support for external controllers, meaning that games either have no rumble or very primitive rumble. According to some commits spotted recently, that's about to change.

At the moment, Android has a very unsophisticated API for vibrations on external devices. As XDA notes, the problem with this is that developers have no control over things like amplitude of vibrations and custom vibration effects. Because of this, many games forgo any haptic feedback with external controllers. Google decided to address this a few months back, with XDA spotting some AOSP commits aimed at improving rumble support for external devices. The code adds amplitude control and indicates that custom vibration effects could come soon.

The commits haven't yet been merged, at least publicly, but it's very possible they've already been merged internally and Google has only just made the commits public. If they haven't yet been merged, the changes could still make it into Android 12 if they're merged in the next few weeks. Here's hoping that Google is able to merge them in time.

Source: XDA