Xbox announced last month that they have invited select Xbox Live members to preview system updates early. The engagement from the community has been incredible and we’ve gotten valuable feedback and bugs that have helped inform our feature improvements and quality before we rolled out the system update to the broader community. Thank you to those who shared their thoughts and let us know what they loved and what wasn’t working so well.

We will continue to push new features and other updates to these folks to explore and we’ll be trying new things with the UI, like notifications, different ways of discoverability, and a bunch of other ideas the team is working on. Through this process, some features will launch, others might not and all will be refined through feedback. We value your feedback and want your help shaping the future of Xbox One.

Today we’re excited to share the next wave of features that we will begin to roll out. These features will become available to members getting the early previews in the coming days and weeks and will be available to the full Xbox Live community in April.

  • Game and app saves and updates. A game save progress bar will show you the status of your game saves. You will also be able to easily tell what games and apps are being updated or have been updated recently.
  • Friends improvements. Notifications will be added to see when favorites and friends sign in to Xbox Live. This actually was one of the most frequently requested features from the first preview wave and we made it a priority to include it in the April update. Also, friends who are in multiplayer will be identified in the friends list. We’ll also add the ability to view friends’ most popular apps.
  • Kinect voice and motion improvements will continue to fine tune the quality and reliability of Xbox One commands.
  • Improved GameDVR video quality through compression algorithm improvements.

We’re also extending more invitations to Xbox Live members around the world in our current 13 Xbox One markets. New invitees will be sent an Xbox Live message to register. Once registered, you will be able to test the early features included in the update and provide feedback on a private forum.