Wagner James Au / New World Notes

A veteran Second Life insider just sent me this message they received as a member of the test group for Second Life's long-awaited, official mobile app:

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

I'm reaching out to Linden Lab now for an official comment, but this message is surprising and likely to disappoint the community. We received word only last July that this app had been approved for publication by Apple.

That said, my source (who also shared the app images here), tells me the app itself had pretty limited functionality:

"It had been stagnant for months. Didn't have push notifications, and until a recent update would only work when you had the app open on your screen," they tell me.

Apparently there wasn't even a 3D graphics display — but as expected, there was a special chat zone for app users:

"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."

Screencap of that above.

Hopefully Linden Lab sends me an update soon. It's quite possible that they are only pausing this particular app development and planning to release a "new direction" SL app with different functionality. But I'll let you know more when I know more.