Back when Microsoft announced the Xbox One, the company made a big deal out of the ability to snap applications, giving gamers the chance to have apps open whist continuing to play a game.
This meant that live TV could be watched whilst still playing the latest Gears of War, for example, but having the Xbox One be capable of performing all of that multitasking took a toll on the console, and now Microsoft is removing the feature completely in order to free up resources.
Xbox Platform head Mike Ybarra took to Twitter in order to announce the change, simply saying that Snap has been replaced “to improve multitasking, reduce memory use, improve overall speed, and free up resources going forward for bigger things.” We don’t yet know what those “bigger things” will amount to, but we have high hopes if Microsoft is pulling entire flagship features in order to make way for them.
The removal of the snap feature won’t happen immediately, unless you are on the Xbox One Preview Program. Testers on the program are starting to see consoles updated to the new preview version of the Xbox One dashboard, with the release set to be made available to all Xbox One owners later in the year.
For now, though, everyone who isn’t on the program can continue to snap to their hearts’ content.
While Microsoft did make a big deal of the ability to snap apps during the launch of the Xbox One, we do find ourselves wondering how many people consistently took advantage of such a feature.
We can only assume that Microsoft has those kinds of metrics available internally, and the fact the company has nixed the feature at this stage tells us that it wasn’t as popular as we might have been led to believe.
Let’s hope that is the case anyway, else Microsoft has quite the backlash on its hands.
(Source: Mike Ybarra [Twitter])
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