The Nintendo Switch Online 2.0 app update finally lets you see which friends are active
When it comes to online functionality in video games, Nintendo tends to struggle, and the Nintendo Switch isn’t free from the company’s short-sightedness, thanks to an Android and iOS app that’s necessary to get the most out of your online games on the system. Standard functionality like in-game voice chat has been cordoned off to the app for many Switch games, and since Nintendo Switch Online is tied to a subscription service, the lackluster app has been a sticking point for ages.
Well, it would seem Nintendo finally remembered the Nintendo Switch Online app exists, so it’s received a noteworthy update. Nintendo Switch Online is now on version 2.0, bringing with it a new UI design, plus a handful of new features, such as the ability to see which of your friends are online.
The Nintendo Switch Online app wasreleased in 2017 to very little fanfare. As you can imagine, requiring an external app for voice chat didn’t appeal to most gamers (not when Discord is used just as easily and is much more robust), especially when that app was always missing standard features, like the ability to add friends from the app itself. What’s crazy is that even after today’s 2.0 update, you still can’t add friends in the app, only on your Switch, a perfect illustration of Nintendo’s lack of foresight in the online gaming arena, still going strong.
What we do get with today’s update is a newly-designed UI, the ability to change your online status setting, and you can now see which of your friends are online. It would also appear that Nintendo finally recognized that sharing friend codes that were only generated on the Switch was extremely cumbersome, and so you can now view your friend code inside the Nintendo Switch Online app to easily share this code with friends and family. While these are all minor changes that should have been available in the app, to begin with, it’s nice to see Nintendo getting around to such efforts five years after the app’s initial release.
So if you’d like to take a look for yourself to see what’s new in the Nintendo Switch Online app, you can navigate to the Play Store listing through the widget below.
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This article is sponsored by Total Wireless.
