Android TV is doing some last-minute prep work for this week’s arrival of Stadia support

This story was originally published 2021/06/07
9:00am PDTon Jun 7, 2021 and last updated 2021/06/21
12:16pm PDTon Jun 21, 2021. 

If you’ve owned a Chromecast with Google TV since last fall’s launch, your long wait for Stadia is nearly over. Despite having been on the market for nearly a year and a half now, Stadia still isn’t officially playable on Android TV — but that’s changing, and soon. Earlier this month, Google announced that there’d be an official Stadia client up and running on Android TV on June 23rd, but if you’re really impatient, you can get the app pre-installed on your device right now.

Starting June 23rd, Stadia will be available for download on any Android TV device. Similar to early mobile support, only a handful of devices are officially supported, but the list includes several of the most popular Android TV dongles, boxes, and sets. If you’re using one that’s not on the list, you can still download the app and enable “experimental support” to play, but Google warns it might not be an ideal experience.

Here’s the full list of devices that’ll be fully supported out of the gate:

The change lowers the barrier of entry to Stadia for newcomers: you won’t need to buy special hardware to play on your TV. Just download the app and connect any old Bluetooth controller.

You’ve been able to play Stadia on Android TV for some time with a little elbow grease, but an official TV app has been a hotly anticipated feature since the service launched back in 2019.

Looks like you are now able to download the #Stadia app on #GoogleTV ahead of the June 23rd rollout and it has a nice boot up animation (It will say coming soon if you try to log in btw) pic.twitter.com/kMbd8jwTBd

— Kris (@krizzybot) June 21, 2021

Though the app won’t be accessible for another couple of days, it’s available on the Play Store on Android TV right now. You can install and boot the app, though logging in just brings you to a “Coming soon” display.

Outside of what’s visible in the screenshots above, we don’t yet know what the app will look like or how it’ll perform. With any luck, it’ll be snappier and less of a hassle to navigate than Stadia’s notoriously sluggish Chromecast Ultra interface. We’ll find out later this week.

Live on the Play Store

Google has made the Stadia app available for download earlier than expected, though users can’t stream their games just yet. Our coverage has been updated.

• Thanks:
• John Cassidy