Dish 2.0: a microphone in your controller, Linux joins the family

Every Dish app and Satellite now share one version number, and the first one is 2.0. Here is what it changes when you sit down to play.

Party chat hears you through the pad

A DualSense or DualShock 4 plugged into a PC has its own microphone and its own speaker, and games and voice chat use them. Dish can now give the emulated pad the same thing. Switch Microphone on for a controller and your phone’s microphone becomes the pad’s microphone. Whatever the game plays through the pad’s speaker comes out of your phone, in stereo.

It is off until you turn it on, per controller. Mute means muted: while muted, Dish stops capturing rather than sending silence, so nothing leaves your phone at all. A small chip floats on every screen while a mic is live, red when hot, grey when muted, one tap to silence everything.

This needs Satellite on Windows and a controller emulated as a DualSense or DualShock 4. On the desktop clients, a DualSense plugged in over USB uses its own headset mic and speaker instead.

Sunshine, Apollo, and Wolf, without Satellite

If you already stream with Moonlight, Dish can now pair with the host directly and show up there as a controller. Buttons, sticks, motion, touchpad, rumble, and battery all make the trip. Satellite is still the way to get the full set, including the microphone, but it is no longer required to hold your phone as the controller for a Sunshine box.

Dish for Linux

The Linux client is out of the roadmap and on the downloads page: .deb, .rpm, AppImage, and Flatpak. Plug a pad into a Linux desktop or a Steam Deck and send it to whichever machine you play on, with the same pairing and the same feel as the Windows client.

Your real pad lights up

Plug a DualSense, DualShock 4, or Switch Pro into a Dish client over USB and the game drives it: lightbar color, player lights, the mute lamp, and DualSense adaptive triggers. On the phone, the on-screen pad shows the same things and buzzes for trigger rumble. The on-screen triggers are analog now too: slide along the rail for a partial pull.

Crash reports, plainly

Every app now has the same Share crash reports switch, on by default and off with one tap in Settings. When an app crashes it sends a stack trace and the versions involved, and nothing else. Never your inputs, never which PC you connect to. Android reports through Crashlytics, the desktop apps and Satellite through Sentry. Each app’s privacy policy says exactly what a report holds.

The what’s new page keeps the full picture, including a table of what each kind of host can carry.