A short burst of happiness when streaming Xbox games on iPhone

A new Xbox Series X with about a hundred games costs SEK 149 per month. Unfortunately, that’s not entirely true, but there are occasional moments when you feel like it.

I’ve spent a few hours here and there the past few days streaming from home and playing Xbox titles on Iphone and Ipad. Apple’s obscene and arbitrary App Store rules prevent Microsoft from creating its own Xbox Cloud app, but a few weeks ago it became possible to access the platform from the Safari browser (on Iphone and Ipad: Mac is not yet supported).

Unless you have an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, it’s easy to get started. Once you’re logged in, it’s just a matter of clicking Play, choosing the title and waiting for the not-so-long loading screen in that context.

If this is a title you’ve played before, all progress will be saved and you will continue where you left off last. Overall, Microsoft has been able to maintain the same feel and environment as the one you experience when you turn on your Xbox console.

Xbox Cloud is currently available for Android phones, iPhone, Ipad, and PC. I use an Xbox console and a game stand when playing with a phone as a monitor.

(Almost) everything works without noticing

Everything works without a hitch, as long as you ignore the most important thing: the gaming experience itself. whether you play Forza Horizon 4And the controlAnd the Fallout 4And the outer worlds or Cities: Skylines So the Xbox Cloud struggles to draw everything on screen in time. My clicks on the keys are recorded hindsight by several milliseconds, and the sound usually makes a crackling sound as it sounds when lightning strikes.

Microsoft has just replaced its hardware in the Azure cloud with a thicker Xbox Series X and the Iphone 12 Pro or Ipad Pro (2021) I used can’t be held responsible for these concerns.

The problem is that I think the old wifi at home that I checked recently had 22 devices to route traffic to and from. Admittedly, many speed tests show around 90Mbit/s down and 80 up, and I’m running on the frequency band (5GHz) recommended by Microsoft. All this should be enough for a fairly error-free cloning, but it is clearly not so simple in practice.

Sometimes it runs out. Sometimes I forget that I’m streaming a high-performance Xbox game to my iPhone. Unfortunately, it’s a fleeting rush of happiness.

In the meantime, however, Microsoft isn’t standing back on how good or bad streaming works over unstable wifi networks: The big advantage of Game Pass is so far all the titles included in the subscription can be downloaded to the Xbox console on the desktop.

And with the expansion of 5G networks, living room consoles will face competition as every screen becomes home to the latest games.