Since its inception, Google has maintained a Stadia Dev blog to make announcements about new tools, features, programs, and partnerships. The Stadia team is now using it to cover the cloud-streaming platform’s technical aspects with an eye toward achieving “simplicity in a world of complexities for our end users.”
At first glance, setting up the Stadia Controller might appear to be a relatively straightforward process. The user needs to turn the controller on, use the Stadia mobile app to find and connect to the controller via Bluetooth, send it Wi-Fi credentials, and then start playing.
Of course, conditions aren’t always ideal, given the “thousands of different phones and Wi-Fi routers.” Possible technical failures include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) getting disrupted by signal noise and strength. Other failure points include:
A user’s phone might have an unreliable antenna. A controller might be low on battery, or lose power in the middle of setup. A user might background the app, or turn Bluetooth off during setup. A Wi-Fi router might not connect to the controller. The controller might have a mandatory software update that fails to install correctly. These are all examples of issues that could be accounted for in a hardware setup flow.
Besides “Reliability,” “Correctness” and “Approachability” were other tentpoles that the team had in mind.
