Xbox Cloud Gaming Now on iPhones, Chromebooks, Macs and Windows! By Lon.TV

Hey everybody it's Lon madman and if you're subscribed to the Xbox game, pass ultimate subscription service. One of the perks you get is the ability to play Xbox games in the cloud, basically streaming them over to your android mobile phone. We covered that a few weeks ago, but this afternoon I got a notification on my Xbox app saying that I can now run it on my windows, 10 PC, along with my iPhone, and I thought we would try this out because it looks like it's just running as a WebRTC app and if that's the case, we might be able to get this to work on my Mac and a Chromebook in addition to the windows and iPhone stuff. So we're going to play around with this in this video and have a look at it now. I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that I am paying for the Xbox game pass subscription with my own funds. All the opinions you're about to hear are my own.

No one is paying for this review. Nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you're about to see before it was uploaded, so, let's get into it now, starting with the iPhone now on the iPhone and on the iPad. What you need to do is load up your web browser and go to xbox. com play and, if you're not logged into your Xbox account you'll need to log in now. What I also did here is: I got my Xbox controller paired up with my phone via Bluetooth, because you do need the game controller for this to work.

Now, what we're going to do is add this to our home screen. So what they're doing here is getting around some app store limitations on iOS by making this run as a web app. That makes this a very low overhead kind of app first, but it also circumvents the entire app store thing and basically makes this work like an app, even though it's going to be in a web browser now to get the most out of it. What you need to do is go down here and hit the share button and the reason why you need to do this is that we have to add this to the home screen, so you're going to hit that button, and then you're going to scroll your options down until you see add to home screen here, which I'm going to do right now, and I'm just going to click add and what that's going to do is now add an icon to the home screen. So when I click on this, it looks like we're loading up an app, but it's actually embedding this as a full screen web application.

Now, because this is loading up separately, I do need to log into my account again, which I'm going to do right now and once I'm logged in we'll take a look and see how this works all right. So we've got it loaded up now and logged in, and it looks a lot like the android app does with a bunch of games that we can play now. What I'm going to do here is just get the phone into landscape mode just because the games will be playing are in that mode, and I'm going to load up hotshot racing here to start this is a nice game. It's not too demanding on even the regular Xbox console, and my understanding is that the cloud server that we're connecting to is basically an Xbox One device, not something fancier than that at the moment. So we're going to connect to that one, I'm just going to let this run out, so you can see how long it takes to connect.

This takes about the same length of time that I remembered the android version taking. So it's pretty much the same so far, and we'll see how things get together here now what's happening. Is that it's spinning up an instance of an Xbox in the cloud and then booting everything up. I will turn the volume up here, a bit too, and I'll hit start playing, and we'll see what happens now. One thing I noticed we were running through this on a live stream a minute ago.

Is that the connection strength indicator here? Does not appear to be accurate, so it's going to give us some warnings here. It was doing this before, but we found that even with a quote, unquote poor connection, it was playing just fine, so we'll see how this comes together. I also found that when you're first loading up the games, there is a bit of a delay in that it's got to sync up your save game with the cloud server. So I'm going to let this finish loading and when it's done we'll come back and see how this game plays all right, so the game is loaded up, and it synced up all of my save game stuff, just like the android version does, and again this game is pretty fun to play, because it's not all that demanding on the hardware. The lag feels about the same as it does on the android side.

It is a little leggier than some other streaming services out there, but it seems to be working. Okay here, the game looks great, performs pretty nicely. There's no rumble on the controller, probably because we're using a web app. So you won't be able to feel any of the rumble. You would feel on your regular console, but it seems to be running at a solid frame rate here.

This is a game that runs at 60 fps and on my phone here it appears to be running at that level. Right now, you can see that the connection strength indicator is pretty much giving me a warning, but the game is working, just fine we're getting all the input here, and I'm not paying attention. So I'm crashing the car quite a bit um but overall seems to work just like the android one does, for the most part, the Xbox button here works, just like it does on the android app. So it looks like all the buttons are mapped correctly here and the other thing you can do is you can also pick up the phone and actually use touch controls, even though we're not using an official app here, which is pretty neat, so I don't know where the gas pedal is here there. It is maybe that's it there, it goes, so you can do a little touch display stuff with it, but I would uh prefer to use the controller.

One thing that we reviewed recently was this clip that 8bitdo sent us free of charge for the official Xbox controller, where you can clip your phone to it. This one might be worth picking up if you're going to play around with it. So on the iPhone, at least from this, you know kind of a quick look at it. It feels a little rougher than the android version does, but pretty close to the experience I had there. It looks great on the display here with this game at least, and I think it's something that will give you the experience that a lot of android users are experiencing right now and again if you've got an Xbox or a PlayStation controller.

This should work fine with it for bandwidth. It looks like we're pulling down about 10 to 11 megabits per second, maybe 11.5, as I'm looking at things right now on my router. So this is one of the lower data rate game streaming services out there, and this is under ideal circumstances right now in my home, with the fiber optic internet. So if you're out on the road using LTE or 5g it'll be probably a little less than that all right. So now that we know the iPhone works and, by extension, the iPad should work pretty well too, the same way.

Let's take a look at a Chromebook now, all right, so we got our Chromebook loaded up here in full disclosure. This did come in free of charge from Google a little while back for review. This is the pixel book go, but any Chromebook should work like this one's working right now we are on chrome, OS 90, which is the latest version of chrome OS. We went to xbox. com play and logged in, and we've got the interface here and what I'm going to do.

Real quick is load up, ORI and see how that plays, and we'll let it do its thing we're seeing what we saw here before with the iPhone now you'll note that we do have the taskbar down here, along with the browser's address bar at the top, and there is a way to get rid of that. So we're going to let this load up and once the game begins, we should be able to get this running full screen, and one thing I noticed in an earlier take is that it's using about the same amount of bandwidth that the phone was using about 10 to 12 megabits per second, so the image quality won't look all that much better. If anything, it might look a little poorer on this display, because this is a 1080p display and is much larger. So I was noticing some artifacts and stuff on the visual quality that I didn't really notice on the phone, because it was on a much smaller screen now. What I can do here is gone into the upper left hand, corner of the screen and go to full screen, and that will make it fill up the entire display here, and I also noticed that my Xbox button here works too.

Now a little earlier, we tried out a game that had some enhanced touch, controls for the Xbox cloud service, Minecraft Dungeons and, as you can see here on screen, it actually works with this Chromebook's touch display it's not ideal by any stretch, but it was kind of fun to see that they were able to get all of this touch. Controls mapped in the same way that we experienced on the android app when we looked at that a little while back. So let me get into the game here, and we'll see how well it performs on the Chromebook all right. So we got the game loaded, and it is playing here. It definitely does not look anywhere nearly as good as it does on my series x on the 4k TV upstairs it definitely looks a little soft in its image quality.

You can see a better view of it here. The input latency is still kind of an issue here, it's not spectacular, but the game is running, and you can play it, and you'll be able to have a pretty good time with it. I think on a Chromebook, which is something you couldn't do with this service just a couple of days ago, so, all together it seems to be working as advertised. I was able to sync up my save game with the console, save that I have in the Xbox cloud there and all is good here on a Chromebook which wasn't even on one of its supported devices. The sound is great on this too, as it was on the iPhone now.

One thing I did notice on a few of the games is that it was giving me a warning about the web browser, but you can go past the warning, and it'll just boot up and play so for the most part. I haven't found anything that doesn't run here. We did have the controller kind of lose connection with the app or the web app, and we had to reset the controller. But after that it's been working just fine, so it might be a little flaky on Chromebooks, but it does work, and it seems to be working quite well, and this is a better way to go versus going through the android app running on chrome OS, because you can go out to the Google Play Store on most Chromebooks and download the game pass app there. But I think this web solution is the better option for doing the Xbox cloud game streaming all right, so we got my Mac out now.

This is the MacBook Air with the m1. Microsoft recommends safari on the mac. So that's what we're going to try out here, and I'm just going to load up like a really hot game right now that everybody's talking about the show 21. Now it's interesting is I'm getting an error about the controller here, I'm going to continue through that. I was not getting that error with the other games that I was trying on this earlier today, and we're going to let this load up here all right.

So now we've got the mac booted up again. We paired up our Bluetooth controller. The Xbox controller here with the mac, everything seems to be working. Our Xbox button works and everything looks nice on screen and, of course, we can go full screen with this. Now I did try it on safari earlier, and it was not looking so great on safari.

So I think you'll want to stick with chrome or a chrome, compatible browser like brave or something we're running, chrome right now, and it seems to be looking just fine. I would have the sound on right now, but there's a lot of copyrighted music that is playing. I can tell you, the sound sounds fine to me. So no real issues there and the game looks pretty good again we're seeing some artifacts in the visual quality, but it seems to be playing just fine and all the issues we're having with latency on the other platforms is evident here. But the good news is that this works on the mac, just like it works on the Chromebook and on the iPhone.

So if you were looking to play around with this, which is a part of your game, pass ultimate subscription, this might be worth playing around with it's not perfect. Yet it's not as good as GeForce now or Stadia, but it's working now across many platforms in a way that it wasn't before, and I think it's a pretty cool addition to something that you are already paying for. So you may as well play around with it a little, and hopefully they look at maybe adding some options to improve the amount of bandwidth that it uses, because if you have the bandwidth and don't have a data cap to worry about, you might want to stream a little more bit rate for better image quality, and they definitely have to work on the input latency, which was an issue we saw on the android version of this as well, but give it a shot, see how it works for you. I did try it on Windows 10 a little earlier. It worked just as well as it did on here.

I think chrome is probably the best browser to work with, but of course, Microsoft would love you to try it on Microsoft, edge on the windows side, but it worked just as well as you saw on all of these other platforms. Let me know what you thought down in the comments below and until next time. This is Lon Simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the London. TV supporters, including gold level supporters, Chris allegretto tom Albrecht mark Bollinger, Sergio morals mark dell, Jim caliber and Steven sue. If you want to help the channel you can, by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot TV support, to learn more and don't forget to subscribe, visit, lawn dot TV s.

Source : Lon.TV