Xbox SmartGlass

» see xbox.com/en-us/smartglass as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

xbox smartglass launched on 26 october 2012 alongside windows 8. microsoft's pitch: your phone or tablet was a wasted screen while the xbox 360 was on the tv, so it should become a second screen for the console. type search terms into the phone keyboard instead of the analog stick, use the touch surface as a mouse for internet explorer on the dashboard, follow a game-companion feed that showed you the same info the disc had for a xbox live map or unlockables list. shipped on ios, android, windows phone 7 and 8, windows 8 tablets. free.

the app worked. it was mostly a solution looking for a problem. the phone-as-remote use case landed for netflix and youtube on the 360 where the original remote was a pain. the phone-as-companion use case only worked for the small handful of games that shipped smartglass integration, and by 2014 that was already a shrinking list. microsoft never got a general-purpose second-screen consumer behavior to catch. the two-screen assumption was more of a research-lab pitch than a real usage pattern.

i had an xbox 360 in ankara sometime around 2013 for fifa and gta v. i had a symbian nokia at the same time, then a windows phone briefly. smartglass never entered my rotation. by the time i had an ios or android phone that could run it, the console was mostly running netflix streams for a fixed weekly window and no companion app was going to change that. this was second-screen for a US-english demographic that had multiple devices in the same room and wanted a reason to hold both.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

microsoft announced smartglass at E3 2012 as part of the xbox 360 fall dashboard update. the launch coincided with windows 8 on 26 october 2012. the ios and android apps followed within weeks. the pitch stack: better remote control for the console, plus keyboard input from the phone, plus companion data feeds for games that supported the SDK. the SDK part turned out to be the whole story.

games that shipped with smartglass integration were the exception. halo 4 pulled up waypoint stats on the phone. dead rising 3 turned the phone into an in-game phone for radio calls. beyond a dozen or so integrations, the list dried up. developers were not going to design for a second screen that most players did not have loaded.

~ the slide ~

the xbox one launched in november 2013 with smartglass folded into its assumed workflow. by mid-2014 microsoft was already running a parallel unified xbox app that overlapped smartglass functionality on the mobile side. the two products confused each other for two years. by 2016 the xbox app on mobile was the official companion and smartglass was legacy code with no roadmap.

the xbox one smartglass app was pulled in june 2016. the xbox 360 smartglass app kept running because the xbox 360 dashboard itself was still receiving small updates. by 2018 the 360 was firmly on ice, and the smartglass app had no unique value left. microsoft retired the last remaining smartglass apps across ios, android, windows phone 7, windows phone 8, windows 10 mobile, windows 8, windows 10 on 21 november 2018 with a short blog post pointing users to the xbox app.

~ what carried over ~

the "your phone is a controller for your tv device" idea outlived the product. the modern xbox app on mobile does this out of the box for cloud gaming and remote play. every game console and smart tv shipped after 2015 assumes there is a companion app in your pocket. the general-purpose second-screen product died. the pattern showed up embedded inside every specific device app after that.

the companion data feed for individual games never came back at any scale. developers preferred to keep everything on the tv screen, or when a companion mattered they would ship a full separate phone app for the franchise. the SDK-driven "let the game push a mini interface to your phone" model was a microsoft-specific bet that no one else copied.

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