Foldable gaming mode is coming with Android 17

Frankly, we don’t see gaming-specific features come to the Android core all too often. Recently, ex-journalist and now Google employee Mishaal Rahman offered up a surprisingly detailed preview of a great new feature coming to Android 17. It is called Foldable gaming mode, and what it does is basically spawn a highly customizable virtual controller on the bottom half of your unfolded foldable device, with the actual game playing on the top half.

For now, it’s just a 50/50 split, which you can’t adjust, but that could come in the future. The virtual joystick emulates controller inputs on a system level, which means that any game that already has controller support should just work automatically. The only real requirement for the game is for it to be adaptive, so it can scale down to half the display in the first place.

The virtual gamepad currently supports the usual controller inputs: D-pad, left and right thumbsticks, A, B, X, Y, L1, L2, L3, R1, R2, R3 and Start. Despite lacking a split percentage adjustment, even in its current pre-release state, the feature already has quite a bit of customization to it. For one, you can select a staggered control layout, which some people prefer and find more ergonomic. You can also adjust the size of the buttons with three settings: Small, Medium and Large. The joystick supports dark mode, and there is a toggle to enable or disable haptic feedback.

Google engineers also made sure to make displaying and hiding the virtual gamepad as seamless and easy as possible. You can do it on demand, while or before you start gaming, and if Android detects a USB or Bluetooth physical gamepad connected, it will hide it automatically.

It’s a solid foundation for sure, and the best part is that in the following months it will become part of AOSP, which in turn means that every Android manufacturer can adapt it further any way they see fit and make it just right for their particular foldables.

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