Linden Lab Pauses Development On Second Life Mobile App

On Thursday 21st October New World Notes reported that Second Life official mobile viewer development has been paused according to a “veteran Second Life insider”. The member is apparently from the SL Mobile Viewer test group and shared this news below.

From looking at this generally it does appear to be written from Linden Lab and many will be most likely be disappointed by this development pause. It does appear the team is actively working on a new direction from here. I would imagine we will hear from the lab shortly about this latest development and hopefully what they plan on doing next.

From source insider…

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! Linden Lab

At the bottom of the message sent to NWN the lab are closing down TestFlight and the mobile regions on Friday 29th October 2021. The source said that development has been “stagnant for months” and says the following…

“Didn’t have push notifications, and until a recent update would only work when you had the app open on your screen,“

“You logged into a special mobile users only region and would remain there while the app was running, you couldn’t be teleported, seen on the map, had no attachments etc. IM messages worked well .. and that was all we ever got.“

I think Lumiya and SpeedLight Viewer is the benchmark for any Second Life mobile app they have to aim for. I accept development takes time and issues can happen along the way.

I would imagine any launch now of any SL Mobile app won’t happen until later in 2022 or 2023 at the earliest. At the monthly web user office hours in recent months there has not been any major announcements or really much to be excited about it seems.

There is a thread about this on the Second Life Forums for the latest discussions.

More updates soon.