PSA: The Roblox App Beta for Windows is Chugging Along!

how do i revert this change, i honestly hate it I got force opted in : uninstalling does nothing, help

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Just go into account settings on the app, You should see this pop-up.

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Since the initial test of this feature, there have been a number of glaring UX and compatibility issues.

Starting off with the new home screen, it’s incredibly jarring for users with larger screens. I’ve got a 39-inch monitor and the list of games feels extremely overwhelming. Jumping from the website, where the main content is well padded and only 6 games are shown in each sort, the new app takes up the entire width of the screen and shows 16 games (on my screen size). When launching the app for the first time, this was extremely jarring and threw me off guard completely.

Staying on the home and games screens, the button to scroll through games is really hard to notice and blends in with the background too well. I think the Lua app should follow the design of the website in this regard and always show the button, no matter if you’re hovering over the list or not.
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There are also some serious performance issues on the games page, where scrolling drops frames considerably and stopping completely freezes the applications.


Moving onto the avatar editor, it’s really good! It’s miles ahead of the website version in its look and feel, and changes you apply get reflected instantly :pray:! My only point of concern here is that it has some serious performance impact when clicking buttons and spinning the avatar. When launching it, I get a good second of freeze and some lag afterwards. I’m sure you’re aware of this issue, so please let me know if you’d like me to send over a proper profiler dump.

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Edit: after playing with this some more, I found there to be a UX issue with searching items that really confused me for a few minutes. For example, if I search “skirt”, I was presented with clothing and it took me a long time to realize that I had to press the little “Category” button and do “Accessories”.


Onto games, there are two major things that are right now completely preventing me from opting in to this feature and are going to keep me as far away as possible from it.

Starting off with the smaller UX issue, why is the Alt + F4 shortcut now interrupted by this prompt? The whole purpose of the shortcut is to leave the application quickly without having to use my mouse. This is really frustrating, and while it may seem minuscule, the repeated actions to leave Roblox are going to become really frustrating for users. Please don’t try and do cheap tricks like this to keep us on the app.

The most glaring UX and compatibility issue to me with the beta is this new topbar system. More and more developers are adopting custom topbar buttons and interactions, but this feature completely ruins that. When moving my mouse to the top of the screen, a huge bar now covers up the entire topbar (and more!) in a completely unexpected way. It also takes a long time for this topbar to go away again once you move your mouse away.


I’m sure that there are a number of issues I missed and I’d appreciate it if people can reply with any. Hopefully, Roblox can take our feedback onboard here with such a huge feature because it doesn’t seem like they have so far.

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Thanks for all the feedback so far!

A few of you have done this already, but if you can, please include screenshots and descriptions of where you run into these issues as well as your set up. It will help us reproduce/diagnose these issues.

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I believe this issue is already known, but if you’re opted into the Beta, it does not let you sign in to any accounts that are protected with the 2FA Beta.

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Hmmmm. Its interesting that the Roblox Beta App is rolling out for more users, but if its only for a select amount of users, then how come there is a way to do it for everyone?

I’m referring to the DevForum article link below.

Reference: How to use the Roblox App Beta (Mac & Windows)

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Yes, this is mentioned in the official 2FA FAQ. Since the codebase is the same as the mobile app, it makes sense the same issue will be present here. Luckily, there’s an easy workaround, just join any game from the website and you’ll automatically be logged in.

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It’s officially available for more users. That’s an unendorsed unofficial method.

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Is my app in my reference the same exact thing, but just not official by Roblox?

Or is it a completely different program?

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It’s the exact same thing. The method you’re using to enter is simply unofficial.

The “Beta App” is pretty much just a mode for the existing windows program. It isn’t an actual new program/app. All that protocol link does is enable that mode.

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I see.

Thanks for answering my question.

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I like the concept, but it is just the mobile app but on windows. Add all the features from website, make a more computer friendly UI, and fix some of the super frequent bugs if you want people to actually use it.

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Currently, there are various features on the “website” part of the app that don’t occur in-app. For example, if I click the “notifications” button in the chat screen, instead of bringing up a notification widget in-app, it opens up a browser window. This makes for some really clunky UX.

Clicking the “groups” button on the home page does this as well:

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Currently, the classic keybinds to quickly leave a game do not work.

In the traditional client, pressing ESC, then L, then Enter would allow you to quickly leave a game without needing to manually click the “leave” button. However, the new beta client does not allow this. It allows you to get to the “Leave” menu, but pressing enter does not allow you to leave since the button is not selected by default, forcing you to use your mouse:

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The amount of robux under your account is not displayed next to the robux icon, whereas on the website it is:
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It seems like the whole app is made for it so players won’t leave the app. It’s literally trapping players in experiences or the app itself with disabling all the quick actions and making experiences full screen. It’s a cheap but good tactic and also can be annoying (and it’s also annoying for devs).

Not liking this mobile design on my monitor. We get bigger monitors for more content to fit in, not the same but bigger content.

This new in-game menu is nice. I liked it from the beginning and now it seems like it’ll be enabled.

With a desktop app, will we finally get V-Sync at least??

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I’m sorry if I annoy anyone with a possibly irrelevant post, but where do I sign up for the Roblox App Beta for Windows? Is it like invite-only or do I have to do something? There’s no relevant reply I’ve seen in both this and the original post yet, so any help is appreciated!

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You can manually opt in through methods posted above. But officially, Roblox chooses who to enroll and who to not enroll at-scale.

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Something I noticed when using this a few weeks ago, when joining a game from the website, the app would briefly load its main page and it’d increase loading time a bit while it did that, and, that got pretty annoying pretty fast with how much I was joining games for debugging and testing and such.

I’m curious to know if this has been fixed.

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A lot of people seem to forget that literally every OS has a task switching feature which prevents this. On Windows its Alt+Tab, on Mac its Command+Tab. And, regardless, you can’t really get trapped in a game in the app, it works the same way as playing in fullscreen, which, a lot of people do. If a game freezes while you’re in the app, you can also bring up the “This window is not responding” prompt and kill it on Windows, all it takes is clicking a few times on the window.

I agree that it’s annoying the app doesn’t have a non-fullscreen mode though.

What problems are you having that V-Sync would fix?

Correct me if I’m wrong, I think that Roblox at least is effected by D3D11 V-Sync settings, as, toggling them in my AMD options does seem to effect how the game appears to display (a lot less appealing to me for some reason). It does not effect the framerate shown in Roblox’s debug menus though.

I also don’t think V-Sync is necessary anyways, for some reason, because I have never seen screen tearing happening in Roblox, but, have seen it happen in other games before. I think with Roblox’s D3D11 mode at least, the frame is probably drawn to a buffer before its displayed on the screen, and I guess the speed that the buffer can be copied to the GPU is fast enough for screen tearing not to be a problem with my GPU. It probably wouldn’t be a problem with other GPUs either.

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