Party chat, achievements, and game hubs get a spring cleaning in Xbox One’s April update, now live

By Will Fulton April 6, 2015

April Update for Xbox One Out Now

Spring is in the air: The birds are singing, savvy news readers are sorting through what were and were not pranks, and the April system update for Microsoft’s Xbox One console has started rolling out, bringing a variety of new and improved features to make your X-bone experience even smoother.

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Party Chat has been imbued with new icons and notifications to help set up microphones. The party app will now notify you when privacy settings or network problems are preventing particular party members from joining the chat, letting you troubleshoot the problem and get to playing much more quickly. The promised voice messaging and dedicated servers for party chat are still in the works, but have been held back in preview for the time being while all the kinks are worked out.

Game hubs, introduced in the previous update, consolidate all of the information and content of your favorite games into a single location. Now they have been integrated with the activity feed, letting you easily follow what your friends have been up to in their games.

Achievement notifications have been revamped as well. Now, in addition to the name and gamerscore value for each achievement, you will see a description when it pops up, letting you know what you did to earn it.

The What’s On area of the dashboard is now available for Xbox One users in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. There you can find popular games, movies, and videos, along with trending TV shows if you have configured your cable to run through the console with OneGuide.

Check out the full rundown of the April update over on Major Nelson’s blog or the Xbox Newswire. Head over to Xbox Feedback if you have an idea for a feature that you would like to see.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…

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