Mobile Feedback
under review
Crush Cutie
This isn't a bug. There doesn't seem to be anywhere to put feedback where it will be read by relevant parties.
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I'm not having a good time with the mobile app. I've been a user since Alpha. Upgraded to premium+ specifically to participate and follow development. Own multiple compatible devices, some new, some a little older (mostly A14).
The problem; The app is delivering the wrong thing in the wrong way.
While admirable and technically impressive, It's trying to beat the hurdles faced by the desktop client with few meaningful adaptions to the platforms core 'streaming' architecture and with little to no thought put into the experience.
On a desktop, I have network stability, compute and patience for a viewer to extrapolate an entire world and its participants from few breadcrumbs, each exploding fractal like into chains of assets and textures, all processed and decoded locally.
On mobile .. I don't. I should be getting a 'baked' download for each avatar ready to be unpacked and rendered with only future changes streamed. Same for the local area.
Actually mobile on data .. in a major US city, the best Verizon can muster, stationary, sitting down with both hands on my device. Not a chance.
I really do not want to dismiss the solid improvements to the app and (having done viewer development) understate how incredibly impressive it is. The dev is a literal wizard, the app just doesn't do anything of value.
I don't have a use case for "hey look, here's Second Life improperly & incompletely rendered running on my magic glass rectangle".
The experience presented by the app should be the foremost consideration. To that end, presenting Second Life as completely as possible and assuming the experience will automatically follow is fundamentally flawed. Especially when presented on a limited device burdened by necessity with many technical and usability compromises.
Second Life's undefinable magic is in the minutia, all of which are immediately overshadowed by technical problems and why the 2 decade cry from desktop users has been a loudly nonspecific "fix the bugs".
There needs to be some real thought put into what the mobile app is trying to deliver as an experience.
- What does a successful, enjoyable, satisfying mobile session look like?
- How long does a session last?
- What locations does this favor?
- What are the core requirements that experience demands?
The app shouldn't attempt to tick all possible boxes Second Life as a platform can offer only to accomplish them all badly; No one is asking for a Second Second Life with extra unreliability and jank.
- What are the primary use cases people have for logging in?
- Which of these fit the parameters and constraints presented by a mobile device and session?
- What does the mobile app need to excel at that use case (not simply the minimum requirement) ?
Second Life is not strictly a sight seeing platform. The literal destination is almost never the destination (even if it would fully rez on mobile).
We do not visit a club to be literally at a club, we go to a club for the entertainment and social experience on offer. We do not visit a shop simply to be at a shop.
While it is true that exploring, roaming alone, standing about looking at one's own idealized virtual manifestation are all things we do in Second Life. None are worth the attention, engagement and powerful mobile device required. They don't in isolation deliver any of the driving needs someone might have to login in the first place. The lack of social tooling front and center brings these specific use cases to the fore; to make matters worse, the app excels at none of them.
Second Life's beating heart is as a social platform.
The mobile client's usability lives and dies based on social tooling. How quickly and easily can a user interact with another user; Locally in chat, direct messaging, group chat, notifications and so on.
- Why is the activity of chatting with nearby avatars several taps away behind menus.
- Why does it seem to throw hard fought world and avatar data away when switching.
- Why are communications reduced to a red dot on a burger menu, out of sight, out of mind.
- Why is there the presumption that I might wish to use voice. Let me spell this out as clearly as I can; I don't use my phone to make phone calls.
- How easy is it to look at another users avatar and read their profile?
- How fast can I respond to a nearby avatar saying hello?
- How fast can I start or switch to an IM session?
All this has to function seamlessly in a modern multi tasking mobile paradigm.
- How quickly can I switch from Reddit to reply to my Second Life friend and then switch back?
- How easy is it to make my avatar do a thing to post on tiktok or some other social media?
- How long can I stay online with my phone in my pocket?
Why should I use this rather than Discord.
Log In
Bridie Linden
marked this post as
under review
Grumpity Linden
Thanks for the thoughtful and thorough post, Coffee - and for your support of the mobile app from the start!
We think you're right, and - we have a lot to build. We have been using "user journeys" as a guiding principle in focusing our development efforts. The journey helps clarify which of the millions of SL features to concentrate on next. Second Life is vast, and the ways our Residents engage with it are seemingly endless. We want to build for our current community and also get up to speed for new residents and their journey as well!
The current user journeys we are working on are "Go to a club" - and "Stay Connected". That means we're working on better interactions with other avatars, notifications, local chat storage, easy sharing outside the app, and of course a grab bag of tech debt and bugs to make the experience more seamless. In fact, we ask ourselves a lot of the questions you list above as we prioritize within the journey.
We want these two experiences to be satisfying - then we'll expand. A mobile device generally has limited screen space, so we wanted to keep the UI minimal by default. It's on our roadmap to both surface social interactions better, and let users make choices to expose more of the UI by default for quick access to their favorite features. We see the many asks in all our feedback channels for specific features, and we keep those in mind as we build out and modify our roadmap.
Crush Cutie
Grumpity Linden
To put a really fine point on it. Mobile data, decent connection, normally I would be streaming 1080p video without a problem.
10th generation iPad A14 bionic. Yes, I am aware there are better iPads, but this one is still being sold by Apple with a starting price of $349
Picture 1 (gray background with ghost) - I log in, This greets me and nothing loads further. I can't interact with the app at all. I give it a minute and .. force it to terminate.
Picture 2 - I log in again, my avatar loads this time, and nothing else progresses from picture 1. I am unable to interact for a moment, Switching to landscape seems to jolly it along. When I can pan the camera, I look around to see what's actually loaded .. and there are houses behind my avatar. It was bogged down loading content I couldn't see.
I've tried it in clubs connected to wifi, My test accounts library avatar will load most of the time, I have yet to see a single other persons. Parts of the club load and unload. Movement inspires the phrase "avatar dodge-ball, and I'm the dodge-ball". I'm honestly surprised I've not been booted & banned yet for showing up like a griefer and smashing up the place.
I don't think "Go to a club" is a realist target to strive for, at least on devices that don't cost as much as a gamers laptop or desktop PC.
Grumpity Linden
Crush Cutie This isn't expected performance or behavior - and isn't what we're seeing across many devices (including very similar to yours) in daily use / qa. It may be worth setting a time to pair up and troubleshoot - maybe we'll be able to identify and fix a failure mode. Let me know if you're up for that.
Dana Enyo
THANK YOU Coffee! This part of the Feedback system really needed an article like this!
Yours ends with "Why should I use this rather than Discord." For me, it's "Why should I use this rather than Speedlight." (Discord pulls people "out of world" and becomes its own thing; at least Speedlight has me inworld, interacting with people where we live.)
Grumpity Linden
Dana Enyo - for the record, we don't want to compete with SpeedLight if that is the experience you find most useful to access SL on mobile - we think it's a great product and are happy for people to keep using it - especially for "power users". We hope the SL Mobile app will provide an immersive mobile experience and allow us to showcase the beauty of SL - but it will never have full feature parity with desktop - and it _will_ have mobile-only or mobile-first features (like push notifications!).
Dana Enyo
Grumpity Linden The one feature that has to be there for me to use it at all is "default text only." In the USA, unlimited cell data is the norm. But in many other countries, it's unavailable or very expensive. I'm glad to hear that LL looks fondly on Speedlight, since that really is the only Android option for we third-world folks.
Crush Cutie
Reddit thread with more user feedback