Microsoft shuts down “Snap” multitasking feature on Xbox One [Updated]

Move promises to “reduce memory use, improve overall speed, and free up resources.”

Kyle Orland – Jan 26, 2017 11:49 am | 44

You'll no longer be able to watch Parks & Rec while doing some light virtual golfing on the same screen on the Xbox One.

[Update: A November story from Microsoft Central previously suggested that Microsoft might replace Snap mode with “a picture-in-picture multitasking implementation, where ‘snapped’ app would simply hover in the corner of your game, rather than wiping out a quarter of your screen with a largely empty bar.” That’s especially interesting considering that Ybarra’s tweet on the matter actually says the team has “replaced Snap,” rather than simply removing it (as our original story suggested). We’ll have to wait for more information to be sure, but there’s some reason to believe multitasking might not be totally dead on Xbox One.]

Original Story

Fans of multitasking on game consoles will be sad to learn that Microsoft is planning to do away with the Xbox One’s much-ballyhooed Snap mode, which lets users plant an app in a column on the edge of the screen while they’re playing a game or using another app.

This isn’t quite akin to what happened last year when Sony removed certain Vita apps because the company didn’t want to put in the effort to support underused features anymore (though that might be part of it). Instead, Microsoft’s Mike Ybarra tweeted yesterday that the removal of Snap is intended “to improve multitasking, reduce memory use, improve overall speed, and free up resources going forward for bigger things.”

That gels with what we knew about how Snap’s multitasking requirements limited what developers could do with the system. Microsoft admitted just before the Xbox One’s launch that the system reserved 10 percent of its GPU processing time for Kinect voice command processing “and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as Snap mode.”

By 2014, a system update from Microsoft had partially unlocked that slice of GPU time for developers by offering “more flexibility” in the availability of Kinect-powered voice and gesture controls. It seems that the removal of Snap functionality will further improve how much processing power and memory can be directly accessed by developers and the system software.

Indeed, the Snap removal comes as Microsoft plans to roll out a major new Xbox One dashboard update that’s promised to be a “faster Xbox One experience than ever before.” While that new interface will still allow background music apps like Pandora to be controlled quickly via the Guide menu, the removal of Snap means that apps with visual components (including those made through the Universal Windows Platform program) can now only be run one at a time.

In our initial review of the Xbox One back in 2013, we were big fans of the ability to snap Netflix or Hulu to one side of the screen while playing a particularly mindless Xbox One game. There were some examples of game and app makers using the feature cleverly, too, such as a snappable version of puzzle game Threes that fit completely in the narrow Snap window.

That said, the need to constantly switch back and forth from the “snapped” app to the main game window to actually do stuff was awkward at best and borderline unusable at worst. Microsoft hoped the use of Kinect voice commands would make this process more seamless, but the company’s eventual unbundling of the costly Kinect from the base Xbox One package limited this use case.

Even in useful cases, like Netflix streaming, the Snap column often left a lot of wasted empty space on the TV screen. A more constrained, rectangular picture-in-picture app mode would make better use of the real estate if and when Microsoft ever tries true multitasking on the Xbox platform in the future.