The Lab ending work on mobile viewers

[Arielle Popstar]

Just got an e-mail from the Lab stating they were ending development on the mobile viewer and heading in a new direction to be announced soon. Testflight and the mobile regions will be closed October 29.

[Coffee Pancake]

[Nick0678]

39 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Just got an e-mail from the Lab stating they were ending development on the mobile viewer and heading in a new direction to be announced soon. Testflight and the mobile regions will be closed October 29.

By "mobile viewers" they mean  the  IOS viewer or do they also have an Android Viewer like they should (since 3 out of 4 people on the planet use Android).

[Coffee Pancake]

It was iOS via testflight only.

[Arielle Popstar]

1 hour ago, Nick0678 said:

By "mobile viewers" they mean  the  IOS viewer or do they also have an Android Viewer like they should (since 3 out of 4 people on the planet use Android).

Supposedly they were going to start on an android after the IOS was sufficiently advanced.

[Alwin Alcott]

2 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

a new direction to be announced soon

2033

[Coffee Pancake]

That's the part that had me confused. New direction .. we either have a mobile client of some kind or we don't.

Does that mean the new client wont have IM chat as that's the only 'direction' this client seemed to have.

What would be the point of a Second Life mobile app that didn't include some way to interact with other people in Second Life?

[Sammy Huntsman]

3 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Just got an e-mail from the Lab stating they were ending development on the mobile viewer and heading in a new direction to be announced soon. Testflight and the mobile regions will be closed October 29.

Can we see this email? 

[Arielle Popstar]

11 hours ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

Can we see this email? 

verbatim it said:

 

Quote

 

Good morning everyone,

After reviewing the current state of the SL Mobile Viewer and the helpful feedback from residents, we have decided to pause development on this branch. The team is actively working on a new direction to take from here. We should have some news on that soon. 

We’d like to thank you all for your time and feedback. It was very valuable to us! We will be closing TestFlight and the mobile regions on October 29th, 2021.  Again, thank you for participation! 

 

Does that help?

[Hydra Acer]

There is already a company (see official TPV list to find it) that is working on mobile viewers for IOS/Android and WEB that are light years ahead of Linden Lab. It's not a foolish move to focus the company's efforts in another direction.

[belindacarson]

39 minutes ago, Hydra Acer said:

There is already a company (see official TPV list to find it) that is working on mobile viewers for IOS/Android and WEB that are light years ahead of Linden Lab. It's not a foolish move to focus the company's efforts in another direction.

yeah but a lot of people don't want to actually register to use that viewer................................

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, Hydra Acer said:

There is already a company (see official TPV list to find it) that is working on mobile viewers for IOS/Android and WEB that are light years ahead of Linden Lab. It's not a foolish move to focus the company's efforts in another direction.

SL is an avatar centric virtual world, not a cumbersome chat app with a little inventory management on the side.

We don't need the whole desktop experience, but we do at least need some kind of visual presence.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

well as sad as this is,  it is their product after all and if they feel they need to go in a differnet direction, then I wish them best speed possible.  

[Ardy Lay]

New direction suggestion:  Fix rendering so @bigmoe Whitfield can run it on his POTATO.  (He has a really good computer too.)

Edited October 22, 2021 by Ardy Lay

[Chris Corvinus]

Good. They should have never started it. The app also looked like something you could create on your own using a free mobile app creator website. Horrible, horrible. HORRIBLE.

[Daniel Voyager]

The lab have been working on this for years and in the summer it looked like development was almost there. Many were expecting the beta version to launch before the end of 2021 but this pause is disappointing. 

I think Lumiya and SpeedLight Viewer is the benchmark for any Second Life mobile app they have to aim for. Hopefully the lab will aim for better for iOS and Android in the near future. 

[Nick0678]

17 minutes ago, Daniel Voyager said:

Lumiya

Ahhh ... yes that beautiful little Android app made back in 2011 (or earlier, can't even remember) from a single person (Alina) and still the best Mobile Client ever made.... in the meantime we are 2 months before 2022 and LL is unable to make one.

[Hydra Acer]

33 minutes ago, Daniel Voyager said:

The lab have been working on this for years and in the summer it looked like development was almost there. Many were expecting the beta version to launch before the end of 2021 but this pause is disappointing. 

I think Lumiya and SpeedLight Viewer is the benchmark for any Second Life mobile app they have to aim for. Hopefully the lab will aim for better for iOS and Android in the near future. 

Daniel, we must also take into account that today there are very good alternatives for streaming content retransmission. the adaptation of a viewer to be managed and used by streaming (like google's stadia or Microsoft's Xbox).

Today thanks to this technology you can play games that require high performance on pc or mobile with low resources as long as you have a good internet connection.

Personally I think LL should go in that direction. Focus the efforts in that its content can be used moderately well on any computer, whether it is a high performance pc, a mobile or a web browser.

[Coffee Pancake]

5 hours ago, Hydra Acer said:

Daniel, we must also take into account that today there are very good alternatives for streaming content retransmission. the adaptation of a viewer to be managed and used by streaming (like google's stadia or Microsoft's Xbox).

Today thanks to this technology you can play games that require high performance on pc or mobile with low resources as long as you have a good internet connection.

Personally I think LL should go in that direction. Focus the efforts in that its content can be used moderately well on any computer, whether it is a high performance pc, a mobile or a web browser.

With one small inconvenient caveat.

IT'S REALLY FRIKIN EXPENSIVE

Streaming SL from cloud rendering servers has been tried by LL at least twice so far and proved to be entirely unpopular. Reviewers given free accounts loved it. A few paying customers got some use from it. Most of us just took the position that it was neat .. and did I mention expensive.

The only reason to go down the cloud rendering road for SL (yet again again) would be to impress some techbro investor or media outlet, neither of which give us, the actual customers, much of actual value.

At this point the first question my inner cynic has should LL do this (again again again) is .. how long before we can expect a brand new overlord.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

14 hours ago, Hydra Acer said:

Daniel, we must also take into account that today there are very good alternatives for streaming content retransmission. the adaptation of a viewer to be managed and used by streaming (like google's stadia or Microsoft's Xbox).

Today thanks to this technology you can play games that require high performance on pc or mobile with low resources as long as you have a good internet connection.

Personally I think LL should go in that direction. Focus the efforts in that its content can be used moderately well on any computer, whether it is a high performance pc, a mobile or a web browser.

Onlive struggled with this, they had an SL viewer and a firestorm viewer from their service streamed, Sony ended up buying them out, killed it,  it's super expensive to do this,  as normal percentile bandwidth is cheap, on the scale of streaming,  you have to go all in and I'm not talking,  buying services as needed, I'm talking everything bought at once and then hoping and praying your upstream provider can get you a good percentile for the usage you are about to use.    why am I aware of the latter, I looked into it, full rendering, full backhaul, the works,   equipment wise,  not to bad,  250k,  loans can handle that, but filling the service, keeping it fully, competiting with google, ect.  yeah no,  and the upstream costs I could not build into fully for my customers to pay, I'm not eating that out of pocket,  service would be shutdown and sold within the first month.

[animats]

11 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

IT'S REALLY FRIKIN EXPENSIVE

Right. Shadow is $30/month. NVidia GEforce Now is about $200 a year. (They have a free tier. Take a number and wait for a connection, then connect for an hour.) Paperspace is about a dollar an hour.

Having one of those options endorsed by LL would be moderately useful, so there's a pathway to SL from more platforms.

 

[Diamond Caudron]

19 hours ago, Daniel Voyager said:

The lab have been working on this for years and in the summer it looked like development was almost there. Many were expecting the beta version to launch before the end of 2021 but this pause is disappointing. 

I think Lumiya and SpeedLight Viewer is the benchmark for any Second Life mobile app they have to aim for. Hopefully the lab will aim for better for iOS and Android in the near future. 

Lumiya for sure. SpeedLight is over-hyped considering it's current state IMHO, but getting there.

Edited October 24, 2021 by Diamond Caudron

[Chris Corvinus]

On 10/23/2021 at 6:28 AM, Nick0678 said:

Ahhh ... yes that beautiful little Android app made back in 2011 (or earlier, can't even remember) from a single person (Alina) and still the best Mobile Client ever made.... in the meantime we are 2 months before 2022 and LL is unable to make one.

Its really pathetic. Really pathetic.

[Adamburp Adamczyk]

Can we get some information on this please SuperTom>?

 

@Patch Linden

@Tommy Linden

[Coffee Pancake]

On 10/24/2021 at 12:14 AM, animats said:

Right. Shadow is $30/month. NVidia GEforce Now is about $200 a year. (They have a free tier. Take a number and wait for a connection, then connect for an hour.) Paperspace is about a dollar an hour.

Now factor in data costs and the need for constant solid bandwidth that remains fixed regardless of what you're doing, also the power draw on the device in question.

If the use case is running SL on a mobile device from home, then adding SL to Steam and using in home streaming is a far more viable solution. Getting the actual SL client on Steam would be a great gateway to new users.

For home use as an alternative to owning a decent PC/Laptop, a subscription of $360/$200 a year is more than the face value of the many SL users entire computers.

On 10/24/2021 at 12:14 AM, animats said:

Having one of those options endorsed by LL would be moderately useful, so there's a pathway to SL from more platforms.

Not a useful platform. 

Full fat SL is a high engagement experience with a wide range of personal use cases. Unless your exclusively roaming the grid alone, you can't meaningfully accomplish anything social or constructive poking such a rich and cumbersome interface for a few minutes waiting for a bus or on break or pooping on company time. You're either in SL, or you aren't.

This is one of the things I thought the SL mobile client had actually gotten half right*, avatar persistence and a focus on communication.

*Ideally I would have liked to see this expanded to side by side approach where the mobile client just became a secondary login that would receive messaging etc allowing a desktop client to be logged in at the same time. Much like you can have multiple on going connections to telegram or discord.