Your Android phone could soon get a key PS5 feature, thanks to Android 12

While most mobile games are pretty small file-size-wise, letting you play soon after you buy or hit download, some of the best games can take a little while to download, because they have loads more assets.

It sounds like Android 12 could bring a feature which lets you skip the wait, though. Google is currently hosting a mobile game developer conference, and as spotted by XDA Developers, one keynote speech is on “delivery space updates”, with the description saying the company will “unveil a transformational feature for Android 12 devices”.

Thanks to the title of the speech, people are assuming that this feature will be one we’ve already seen on PS4 and PS5 consoles – that’s the ability to play a game as soon as you’ve pressed ‘download’, without waiting for the title to install.

Feature this

On the Sony consoles, this works as a certain portion of the game will be downloaded and installed first, and you can play this as the rest downloads. It could work this way for Android phones too, though it’s possible Google could work on a cloud streaming solution that lets you play the game in the cloud while the game installs.

Either way, this feature sounds pretty useful for some players. If you’ve got a poor internet connection and often have to wait long periods of time for a game to download, or love super-complex mobile games that would take ages to download even on the best connection, this could help you.

However the word “transformational” could be seen as quite a stretch.

We’ll have to see what this feature is, and how it really works, and thankfully we won’t need to wait too long with the speech taking place later on July 12.