Xbox Insiders in Beta Ring Receive New Friends and Followers Experience

Xbox Insiders in the beta ring are now receiving the new Friends and Followers experience that Microsoft first revealed on September 11th. This new experience has already been available to users in the Alpha Skip-Ahead Ring for about two weeks, but Microsoft should now deem it stable enough to roll it out to a wider audience.

The main changes to this experience are the reintroduction of friend requests and new privacy settings and management options. In the new system, if a person wants to be friends with someone, they have to send a friend request and get accepted. If that person doesn’t accept your request, you can follow that person instead.

New Features and Experiences

Beta ring update version 2409.240925-0005 includes many fixes and several known issues. The full change log is below:

Friends and Followers

Making friends has never been so good! Starting today, Xbox Insiders will experience a new way to manage their relationships on Xbox.

Includes Fixes

Thanks to great feedback from Xbox Insiders and the hard work of Xbox engineers, we’re excited to announce that the following fixes have been implemented in this build:

Capture and Share

Addressed an issue where game clip capture would not always terminate when drive space was low, which could lead to unexpected performance issues until the console was restarted.

Installation

Addressed issue where some game add-ons would not install on the same drive as the base game when using more than one storage device.

System

Various updates have been made to correctly reflect local languages across consoles.

Known Issues

Known issues may have been listed in previous Xbox Insider release notes, but are not being ignored! However, it may take more time for Xbox engineers to find a solution. Learn more about known issues below.

Friends and Followers

Xbox 360 friends you add to your favorites may appear in both your friends list and your Following list.

You’ll see an approved friend request notification when someone adds you to favorites or shares their real name with you.

Search

We know that switching to the emoji keyboard when searching in Home or Guide can cause your keyboard to lose focus. This is especially true if you select a colon or exclamation point before the transition.

Solution: Leave the keyboard, search, then try again with the cursor in a different location before switching to the emoji keyboard.

If you encounter any of these issues, please submit your feedback to Report a Problem.

Provide Feedback to Team Xbox

If you’re interested in becoming an Xbox Insider, check out this FAQ for more information.