Discord rolled out a major update to its mobile app on Tuesday, putting messaging front and center while making a host of small improvements that users have been asking for.
Inspired by user feedback, Redesigned app It designs the Discord mobile experience for on-the-go use compared to the popular desktop app, while changing things to better organize Discord’s Swiss Army knife-like set of social features.
“[In 2015] “Our focus was on building great products for people who play games on PC, with mobile as a companion app when I was AFK,” Discord Group product manager Francesco Polizzi wrote in a post describing the changes. “Over time, the amount of *things* Discord can do has increased dramatically.”
In changes rolling out this week, Discord’s old navigation buttons are gone, replaced by a new set of tabs that direct mobile users to servers, messages, notifications, and their profiles. The company experimented with a design more similar to a horizontal dock, but ultimately kept the servers organized in a vertical left column, like the previous mobile version and desktop app. Since some people belong to many servers and like to switch between them, Discord has chosen to keep the classic layout to display as many servers as possible at once.
Messages now has its own section in the app, where direct messages and group direct messages are collected in one place. This is already a huge improvement from how the app was arranged before and the new design also adds a status area at the top, showing you what friends are doing in real time so you can go in and join them. The option to favor a specific direct message or group of direct messages makes the messaging portion of the app work more like Messages on the iPhone, grouping your most frequent contacts at the top for ease of use.
Tapping a channel or thread now displays information more clearly, grouping media, links, files, and members into a larger, cleaner design. Search has also gotten an overhaul and can now display results for messages, attachments, pinned messages, and files through a global search bar. Overall, many of Discord’s new improvements echo other messaging-focused apps, especially Apple’s own, improving the mobile experience for how people actually tend to use the app on the go.
Other improvements focus on making the app more visually vibrant, including a revamped profile page that highlights some of Discord’s recent focus on custom profiles. Moreover, sharing photos and videos looks better and supports larger file sizes while video and audio calling get a new mobile-friendly UI. Furthermore, Discord finally has a proper night mode (“Midnight” theme) and should run faster while using a quarter of the data.