Discord rolls out mobile update in quest to become better messaging app

theverge.com:

By Amrita Khalid, one of the authors of audio industry newsletter Hot Pod. Khalid has covered tech, surveillance policy, consumer gadgets, and online communities for more than a decade.

Discord rolled out a long-awaited mobile redesign on Tuesday that is a noticeable departure from its desktop version, with the focus being on communicating and sharing with friends — including in group and individual direct messages. With the revamp, the Discord app will display navigation tabs as soon as you open the app, including a separate tab for servers, messages, and notifications and a “You” tab that lets users edit their profile and settings.

There’s also a new global DM search function that searches through all your messages, pins, attachments, and other files — in other words, you don’t have to open up a friend’s individual direct message to find the specific thing you were looking for. And that long-rumored dark mode for OLEDs is finally here — and officially dubbed “Midnight.”

It’s a lot of big changes, and if you’re familiar with Slack, Teams, or even the latest Google Chat you’ll recognize some (for better or worse). Regardless, there will definitely be some grumbling as people get used to the new layout.

As a growing group of Gen Z and millennial users spend more time on their smartphones than on desktops, Discord’s mobile refresh is a long time coming. “Over time, the amount of *stuff* that Discord can do has grown exponentially. And yet, the mobile app was forced to just shove it all in a tiiny version of the desktop app. The world has also changed — as more of you spent time using Discord on the go, what was lacking on mobile became more apparent,” wrote Discord’s group product manager, Francesco Polizzi, in a blog