Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google announced a bevy of new features, tools, and programs ahead of the latest Game Developers Conference (GDC) to make bringing PC games to Android easier than ever.
- These include first-class support for the Vulkan graphics API, new partnerships to improve Vulkan support, enhancements to frameworks and tools to identify bugs in Android games, and more.
- The company also announced a pilot program that helps developers throughout the whole process of bringing a game to Android, from development to publishing on Google Play.
Mobile gaming has come a long way since the early days of Android, but even the best Android games don’t stack up to what’s available on consoles and PCs. This is why retro console emulation is so popular among Android gamers, as emulation unlocks access to game catalogs that are far superior to what’s natively available on Android. Google wants to make Android and its Google Play platform to be gamers’ one-stop shop for everything gaming-related, though, so it’s announcing new features, tools, and programs in an effort to simplify porting PC games to Android.
Ahead of the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) next week, Google announced changes coming to the Android platform and Google Play as well as partnerships with device vendors and game engine makers to reduce the friction of porting PC games to Android. These changes include first-class support for the Vulkan graphics API on Android, enhanced stability for the Android Dynamic Performance Framework, new tools in the Google Play Console to fix game crashes, and the launch of a pilot program to aid developers in their journey of bringing their games to Android.
Vulkan is now the official graphics API for Android
Google’s biggest announcement today, at least as it pertains to Android, is that the Vulkan graphics API is now the official graphics API for Android. Vulkan is a modern, low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API that provides developers with more direct control over the GPU than older APIs like OpenGL. This increased control allows for significantly improved performance, especially in multi-threaded applications, by reducing CPU overhead. In contrast, OpenGL is an older, higher-level API that abstracts away many of the low-level details of the GPU, making it easier to use but potentially less efficient. Essentially, Vulkan prioritizes performance and explicit hardware control, while OpenGL emphasizes ease of use and cross-platform compatibility.
The main benefit of this change, according to Google, is that it enables developers to add more immersive visuals in their games. Vulkan allows developers to capitalize on the performance of modern smartphone GPUs to unlock features like ray tracing in games or multithreading. Games like Diablo Immortal and Pokémon TCG Pocket leverage the Vulkan graphics API to implement splashy special effects and optimize graphics across a broad range of devices.
Although Google says that it is now transitioning Android to a “modern, unified rendering stack with Vulkan at its core,” Android has actually supported the Vulkan graphics API since Android 7.0 Nougat’s release in 2016. The reason the company didn’t pursue this change earlier is simply due to fragmentation. Even a few years after Vulkan’s introduction to Android, only a small percentage of active devices supported it, and among those devices, only a handful offered robust support. Today, though, more than 85% of active Android phones support Vulkan, and over 45% of sessions from new Android games built on the Unity game engine use Vulkan. Support for Vulkan among Android devices is in a much better place now than it was several years ago, which is why Google feels comfortable making it the official graphics API for Android.
What does it actually mean for Android to make Vulkan its official graphics API, though? Essentially, Google aims to establish Vulkan as the GPU hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for Android, requiring all apps and games utilizing the phone’s GPU to do so through Vulkan. This includes: game engines, middleware, and layered APIs like Android’s HWUI, Skia, WebGPU, and ANGLE.
ANGLE is particularly important. It allows apps and games running on OpenGL ES (GLES) to support both legacy devices without modern Vulkan drivers and new devices without native GLES drivers. ANGLE, short for Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine, is a layered implementation of GLES on top of Vulkan. It translates GLES calls to Vulkan and essentially acts as the GLES driver on some modern Android devices running Android 15.
Starting with the upcoming Android release, i.e. Android 16, though, Google says that “more devices will use Vulkan to process all graphics commands.” Specifically, Android 16 will require some newer devices to use ANGLE for some applications (meaning, only applications on an approved list will use ANGLE). Next year’s Android 17 release, however, will require new devices to use ANGLE for most applications (essentially, switching from an allowlist, meaning only certain apps utilize ANGLE, to a denylist, meaning all apps utilize ANGLE except for those on a specific list.) By “new devices,” Google is referring to devices that ship with chipsets built for the new Android release, as devices upgrading to the new release won’t be forced to meet these new ANGLE requirements in accordance with the Google Requirements Freeze program.
Although most Android devices on the market today support the Vulkan graphics API, there’s little uniformity when it comes to what Vulkan features are actually available. This is because there are many Android devices with old, outdated Vulkan drivers as well as many devices running older versions of Android. Vulkan feature availability can also differ between chipset vendors, further complicating game development.
To improve the consistency of Vulkan support among Android devices, Google introduced Vulkan Profiles for Android (VPA) last year. VPA is a collection of Vulkan functionality that chipsets must support in order to pass Google’s certification requirements for a specific Android release. The VPA for Android 16, for example, requires that chipsets support these Vulkan features at minimum, which build upon the requirements from the VPA for Android 15 as well as the 2022 Android Baseline Profile.
Google also worked with the Khronos Group—the industry group behind the Vulkan graphics API—to develop the latest Vulkan 1.4 release, ensuring that Android devices will broadly support its featureset. The Vulkan 1.4 specification was developed to largely be a subset of the VPA for Android 16, meaning that new devices that meet the VPA16 requirements will support most features in Vulkan 1.4. New SoCs launching with support for Android 17, though, will be required to fully support Vulkan 1.4.
By mandating support for newer versions of Vulkan, Google is essentially culling older GPUs from the market, as devices with those older GPUs won’t be allowed to update to newer Android versions. This is important because it means that robust Vulkan API support will only get better and better among Android devices as time goes on, eliminating a huge reason why mobile game developers don’t take advantage of the latest graphical features available on Android devices.
Better tooling and new pathways to launching games on Android
In addition to improving Vulkan support on Android, Google is also working to make it easier for developers to actually build games for Android. The company announced today that it had partnered with Unity Technologies to make Vulkan integration easier with the Unity game engine. In Unity 6, for example, developers can configure Vulkan on a per device basis. Meanwhile, older Unity versions can access this same setting through plugins.
Google also teamed up with the Samsung Austin Research Center to create a new open source profiler and debugger for Vulkan and AI/ML optimization. This new tool is an integrated GPU profiler toolchain that enables developers to make graphics, memory, and compute workloads more efficient. The tool will be launching later this year.
Next, Google says it has collaborated with MediaTek to optimize the Android Dynamic Performance Framework (ADPF) for MediaTek chips. ADPF is a feature that lets developers adjust the performance demands of their games in real-time based on the thermal state of the device. With MediaTek’s help, Google has made the ADPF more stable, allowing it to “provide longer and smoother gameplay sessions.” Furthermore, several game engines now offer built-in ADPF support, making it easier for game developers to integrate. The feature works on many existing devices without MediaTek chips, such as the Pixel 9 and Galaxy S25, so today’s announcement simply means ADPF is now available in more places and on more devices.
Once developers have launched their games on Android, they can use the new Low Memory Killers feature in the Google Play Console to monitor and improve their games’ performance. This feature offers insight into memory constraints that contribute to game crashes.
Lastly, to aid developers who need end-to-end assistance in bringing their PC games over to Android, Google is launching a pilot program that provides support “starting from Android game development all the way through publishing your game on Play.” Games like DREDGE, TABS Mobile, and Disco Elysium have launched or will be launching soon on Android thanks to this pilot program.
It’s going to take Google a lot of time and effort to make game developers see Android as a premier gaming platform. Google must continue to invest in reducing fragmentation in the Android platform and improving tooling in Google Play if it wants to signal that it’s serious about gaming on Android. Today’s announcements go a long way in establishing confidence in Google’s gaming plans, but it remains to be seen whether it’ll actually convince many developers to port their PC games to Android.
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