{"id":7635,"date":"2024-11-18T09:10:31","date_gmt":"2024-11-18T15:10:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.zoha-islands.com\/?p=7635"},"modified":"2024-11-18T09:10:31","modified_gmt":"2024-11-18T15:10:31","slug":"breaking-second-life-mobile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/breaking-second-life-mobile\/","title":{"rendered":"BREAKING: Second Life Mobile"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"entry-header\">Second Life Mobile Finally Free to Play By All. Linden Lab Execs Explain Their Goals &amp; Strategies With This Long-Awaited Milestone for the Virtual World.<\/h3>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<div class=\"entry-body\">\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/bcq1IDcuEAE?si=h0kxwFbQK_afIFAT\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>Originally published <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/posts\/breaking-second-115956401\">on my Patreon<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>At long last, Second Life\u2019s mobile app is now free for everyone to <a href=\"https:\/\/secondlife.com\/mobile\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">download here<\/a>, and boasts new\/improved features including direct and group messaging. (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bcq1IDcuEAE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Watch the new trailer above<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Almost 2 years of work and millions of dollars of support just became available to everyone in Second Life,\u201d as Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager announced today during a Zoom conference with SL bloggers. \u201cThe biggest milestone is, &#8216;When does this open up to everybody&#8217;? That just happened yesterday. It&#8217;s been a top project for this company.&#8221;\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/posts\/bradford-linden-114570527\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">As he discussed with me last month<\/a>, the mobile app has been a core focus since he bought the company in 2021. In fact, when he took over Linden Lab, &#8220;I shut down most of the external marketing and drove that into making SL better. That&#8217;s what&#8217;s starting to change.&#8221;\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The mobile app was built with the intention of creating an amazing experience for current Second Life users, and an equal aim of bringing back the many tens of thousands of lapsed users who\u2019ve given up over the years. \u201cBeing tethered to a desktop is not how we live anymore,\u201d as he puts it.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In market research, Brad notes, when Linden Lab asked lapsed SLers, \u201cWhy are you no longer coming to Second Life?&#8221;, the primary answer they got back was, &#8216;It doesn&#8217;t have mobile\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>So the company\u2019s first goal with the mobile app is luring back those former or flagging SL users. For the short term, at least, &#8220;It&#8217;s not for people who read about Second Life in a magazine\u201d, and consider trying it out on a whim.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Newly-appointed Linden Lab CTO Philip Rosedale, also on the Zoom, expanded on that, echoing what he said in our recent interview, about moving away from his \u201cmessianic\u201d predictions from the early 2000s.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe world is not as yet and may never allow everyone to be an avatar in a world like SL,\u201d said Philip. \u201cWe&#8217;re very respectful of that distinction.\u201d So the goal with mobile is not to turn Second Life into a simpler mass market experience like Fortnite. \u201cWe&#8217;re not trying to design the mobile client to replace the desktop.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>NEXT: SL App Roll-Out Strategy, Its New Rainbow Colored Icon, and Overcoming Poor App Store Ratings<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Philip and Brad were joined on the Zoom by Second Life\u2019s VP of product, Grumpity Linden, and Sine Wave CEO Adam Frisby, who helped Linden Lab bring SL to mobile, and recently shared with me the long, hilariously blooper-filled road to bringing SL to mobile (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/posts\/making-of-second-109735162\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">read about it here<\/a>).\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Those wacky bugs were actually a core reason why the mobile app was first only available to Premium subscribers.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs we encountered bloopers we realized we couldn&#8217;t open it up to everyone,\u201d as Grumpity explains. &#8220;It kind of hurts to see people on the app store trying to get in and they give us 1 star ratings&#8221; [because they can\u2019t access it for free].\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>While acknowledging they can\u2019t please every SLer, Grumpity and her team have been focused on optimizing specific key \u201cuser journeys\u201d, like going to a club where you can dance, hear music, and chat with nearby avatars.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThen we go to [optimizing] the next user journey,\u201d says Grumpity. However: \u201cWe will never shove the entire SL experience into your phone.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As for the poor app ratings that have accrued since the Premium-only launch early this year &#8212; and have hurt the app\u2019s discoverability to potential new\/returning users &#8212; Linden Lab has a plan for that.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;One of the things you can do is reset [ratings],\u201d Brad explains, &#8220;[though] you can only reset it on the Apple side.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In other words, they plan to launch a substantial update and request that Apple reset user ratings to start from zero. The team is then hoping that the greatly improved app &#8212; which is now also free to use &#8212; will be fairly judged.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs we make it better,\u201d as Adam puts it, \u201c[previously poor ratings] will be overcome.&#8221; He adds that there actually haven\u2019t been that many user ratings so far &#8212; in the low hundreds &#8212; while popular apps garner thousands of them.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>To take one example, the mobile app of competing virtual world IMVU has been downloaded <a href=\"https:\/\/play.google.com\/store\/search?q=imvu&amp;c=apps&amp;hl=en_US&amp;gl=US\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">over 10 million times on Google Play<\/a>, and &#8212; despite <a href=\"https:\/\/nwn.blogs.com\/nwn\/2024\/10\/imvu-vs-second-life.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">reports of increasingly poor user experience <\/a>&#8212; has <em>nearly 7000,00<\/em>0 user reviews with an aggregate rating of 4.5 out of 5.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Linden Lab hopes the app will inspire current SLers to help bring back their friends and group members who\u2019ve left regular Second Life activity, and start re-building the world\u2019s active community.<\/p>\n<p>One challenge for some returning SLers will be <em>locating<\/em>\u00a0the Second Life icon on their phone, since it no longer has the solid dark green blue or bright blue colors of the past, but instead, now boasts radiant rainbow rays emanating from a sun gold eye.\u00a0 (See above.)<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;You can&#8217;t believe how many discussions we had&#8221; about that icon color change, says Brad. \u201cYou know you&#8217;ve chosen a great logo when half the people hate it.&#8221; However, he adds, the old version of the logo \u201clooked awful\u201d in the app store.<\/p>\n<p>Besides, the new version of the Second Life logo is also meant to convey that the now-free app represents a new era for the virtual world.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0&#8220;We wanted to project that things are different in Second Life now,\u201d says Brad Oberwager.<\/p>\n<h3>Have A Great Week From All Of Us At Zoha Islands \/ Fruit Islands \/ Nocturne<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Second Life Mobile Finally Free to Play By All. Linden Lab Execs Explain Their Goals &amp; Strategies With This Long-Awaited Milestone for the Virtual World. Originally published on my Patreon At long last, Second Life\u2019s mobile app is now free for everyone to download here, and boasts new\/improved features including direct and group messaging. (Watch &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/breaking-second-life-mobile\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7642,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,3,4,5,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7635"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}