Intent to Ship: Pointer Lock on Android

[Chromestatus]

Contact emails

abd...@google.com, lt-web-a...@google.com

Specification

https://www.w3.org/TR/pointerlock-2

Summary

Provides access to raw mouse movement by locking the target of mouse events to a single element and hiding the mouse cursor.

Blink component

Blink>Input>PointerLock

Web Feature ID

pointer-lock

Motivation

The Pointer Lock API provides applications the ability to directly interpret mouse movements as an input method, rather than being limited to only reading the position of the mouse cursor. A popular example is that of first person movement controls in three dimensional graphics applications such as games: movement of the mouse is interpreted to control the rotation/direction of the player's camera; no mouse cursor is displayed, and the movement is not limited to the traditional boundaries (such as the user agent's window, or the overall screen) that the mouse cursor is usually subject to, meaning that any mouse movements can be tracked indefinitely in any direction. See a Simple Demo: (https://mdn.github.io/dom-examples/pointer-lock/), and used in e.g. Xbox Cloud Gaming, GeForce Now, Amazon Luna, poki.com, crazygames.com, autodesk.com, etc. The pointer lock API is supported on Desktop platforms, this feature is for supporting this API for Android.

Initial public proposal

No information provided

TAG review

No information provided

TAG review status

Not applicable

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

No information provided

Gecko: No signal

WebKit: No signal

Web developers: No signals

Other signals:

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

No information provided

Debuggability

No information provided

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?

No

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

No

Flag name on about://flags

No information provided

Finch feature name

PointerLockOnAndroid

Rollout plan

Will ship enabled for all users

Requires code in //chrome?

False

Tracking bug

https://g-issues.chromium.org/issues/40290045

Launch bug

https://launch.corp.google.com/launch/4386186

Estimated milestones

Shipping on Android

144

Anticipated spec changes

Open questions about a feature may be a source of future web compat or interop issues. Please list open issues (e.g. links to known github issues in the project for the feature specification) whose resolution may introduce web compat/interop risk (e.g., changing to naming or structure of the API in a non-backward-compatible way).

No information provided

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/6739764319485952?gate=4680627611893760

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

[Yoav Weiss (@Shopify)]

On Monday, December 8, 2025 at 3:50:34 PM UTC+1 Chromestatus wrote:

Contact emails

abd...@google.com, lt-web-a...@google.com

Specification

https://www.w3.org/TR/pointerlock-2

Summary

Provides access to raw mouse movement by locking the target of mouse events to a single element and hiding the mouse cursor.

Blink component

Blink>Input>PointerLock

Web Feature ID

pointer-lock

Motivation

The Pointer Lock API provides applications the ability to directly interpret mouse movements as an input method, rather than being limited to only reading the position of the mouse cursor. A popular example is that of first person movement controls in three dimensional graphics applications such as games: movement of the mouse is interpreted to control the rotation/direction of the player's camera; no mouse cursor is displayed, and the movement is not limited to the traditional boundaries (such as the user agent's window, or the overall screen) that the mouse cursor is usually subject to, meaning that any mouse movements can be tracked indefinitely in any direction. See a Simple Demo: (https://mdn.github.io/dom-examples/pointer-lock/), and used in e.g. Xbox Cloud Gaming, GeForce Now, Amazon Luna, poki.com, crazygames.com, autodesk.com, etc. The pointer lock API is supported on Desktop platforms, this feature is for supporting this API for Android.

Initial public proposal

No information provided

TAG review

No information provided

Was the desktop API reviewed?

 

TAG review status

Not applicable

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

No information provided

Gecko: No signal

WebKit: No signal

Can you file for Gecko/WebKit signals? Did we get signals for the desktop feature?

 

Web developers: No signals

Presumably, someone wants to use this?

 

Other signals:

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

No information provided

Debuggability

No information provided

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?

No

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

No

Is the Desktop feature tested?

[Ashley Gullen]

Will this also be supported in WebView? Speaking as a web developer, it's very useful to have good compatibility between the browser and webview, especially as there are already a number of APIs that are simply not supported in WebView. The original intent to ship does not appear to comment on WebView support at all.

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[Abdelrahman Eed]

Re-sending answers, wasn't visible in the thread for some reason (sorry if you got it twice):

Sorry for not providing the desktop details earlier, as I didn't have much context since it was originally shipped back in 2014, +sch...@chromium.org in case I provided missing/incorrect information about the pointer lock API state on desktop. 

•  Was the desktop API reviewed?

• • The original Pointer lock standard is currently a W3C recommendation: https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/REC-pointerlock-20161027/, since 2016
  • The spec was updated. in 2020: https://www.w3.org/TR/pointerlock-2/ and the update is in a working draft, and already implemented by Chrome Desktop (Chrome 88) & Safari (Safari 18.4), there is an open issue on Firefox to implement: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/448

• Can you file for Gecko/WebKit signals? Did we get signals for the desktop feature?

• • Gecko: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/448
  • WebKit: shipped https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/254

• Presumably, someone wants to use this?

• • Yes, there is an open issue (from 2012) from developers asking support for the Pointer lock API on Android.

• Is the Desktop feature tested?

• • wpt: https://wpt.fyi/results/pointerlock?label=master&label=experimental&aligned&q=pointerlock

_____________________________________________

Will this also be supported in WebView?

• Unfortunately no, this release would not support Android WebViews, there are a few issues regarding permissions & window level state modifications that make supporting the pointer lock API on WebViews difficult for now.

Hope that answered your questions

Thanks

[Rick Byers]

LGTM1

Expanding this fairly widely used desktop API to Android also (for when there is a mouse) makes sense to me and seems like it should be entirely uncontroversial. Thanks for doing it!

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[Rick Byers]

Note that you'll need to request the other bits in Chromestatus (Privacy, Security, Enterprise, Debuggability and Testing). Off the top of my head I think most are likely N/A with an argument that it's just extending exactly what we have on desktop to one more platform.

For Security you'll probably want an actual review of since implementation details can matter and there may be attempts to abuse pointer lock (eg. trying to trick users into think their system is giving them an error about a virus or something), but perhaps you already have an internal google security review for this feature which will have all the necessary information?

Rick 

[Abdelrahman Eed]

Thank you,

I have filed requests for the necessary parts and linked to the internal launch approvals.

Thanks

[Chris Harrelson]

LGTM2

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/a78fb78d-3381-43ab-bf68-5c8c85e27cc2n%40chromium.org.