Believe it or not, the most interesting XBOX news lately hasn’t been about games at all, but about the dashboard. After last month’s round of Insider color experiments, Microsoft is back with another batch of personalization and quality-of-life tweaks, and starting today, Alpha Skip-Ahead XBOX Insiders can take them for a spin.
The headline addition for most gamers is probably the expanded color options. You’ll be able to punch in a specific hex color code for precise theming, or use a new “match my gamerpic” option that pulls a color straight from your profile picture. Once you’ve landed on a shade, a preview shows how it carries across the rest of your console before you commit.
The XBOX Accessories app is also getting a small but useful change. It will now display an image of the actual controller you have connected, whether that’s a standard or special edition XBOX Wireless Controller with a Share button, or an XBOX Elite Wireless Controller Series 2. It sounds minor, but if you’ve ever sat there remapping buttons and second-guessed whether you had the right controller selected, this clears that up at a glance.
Rounding out the update are two features aimed at keeping you informed. After your console updates, you can now pull up the latest release notes right from the top of Home, and those notes have been fleshed out with more detail on new features, changes, and major bug fixes. There’s also a new XBOX service status indicator that appears in the upper-right corner of the screen when there’s a confirmed issue, with a tap taking you to a status page. That last one is a genuinely nice idea, since the usual routine of alt-tabbing to a third-party site or scrolling social media to figure out if it’s you or them has always been a pain.
All of this ties into how Microsoft is gathering feedback these days through XBOX Player Voice, the feedback hub it launched earlier this month. The features here will roll out to more Insiders over time before reaching everyone later down the line. If you want to test them now and aren’t already in the program, you can join the XBOX Insider Program through the XBOX Insider Hub.
