Two things: They were never locked the same way your PS4 wasn't you could connect it wired and use it just fine as a regular controller. The second thing is that the stadia controllers used wifi as their source of connection over bluetooth, for various reasons Google said it allowed better latency with how they set up stadia.
So they're adding the ability to connect from bluetooth with this. In the same way before Sony added driver support to Dualshock controllers on PC, you couldn't use them wirelessly. They're not really "locked" more than the bluetooth support just wasn't there.
> So they're adding the ability to connect from bluetooth with this. In the same way before Sony added driver support to Dualshock controllers on PC, you couldn't use them wirelessly.
I only use it on Linux, and I suspect Sony didn't contribute the driver I use. Actually, I don't think PS4 controllers work wired at all, I believe they always use bluetooth and the wire is only for charging. AFAIK anyway.
Very odd that they decided to use wifi instead of bluetooth initially. Between this and the time they spent writing yet another file transfer tool, I'm getting the impression that Stadia was a very unfocused project, trying to do things differently (resume driven development?) when they should have been using off-the-shelf solutions and standard approaches for everything possible.
There are alternative drivers out there (for use with knockoff controllers that try to replicate the offical device IDs, for example), but if you haven't done anything special you're probably using the Sony driver.
I have a PS4 controller, not a PS5 controller. But I guess they did this for the PS4 controller as well? I would not have expected that from Sony of all companies.
Edit: As far as I can tell, the PS5 driver is hid-playstation while the PS4 driver hid-sony. hid-sony has had commits from at least one Sony employee since 2017, but doesn't seem to have originated from Sony.
The controller communicated directly with Stadia, avoiding the latency of having to push it through your machine's input stack and only then sending it to the servers.
So they're adding the ability to connect from bluetooth with this. In the same way before Sony added driver support to Dualshock controllers on PC, you couldn't use them wirelessly. They're not really "locked" more than the bluetooth support just wasn't there.