Discord’s mobile overhaul is a pivot to friends and messages

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 post announcing the update. 

The new app has done away with the confusing lineup of tabs at the bottom and narrowed things down to just your servers, messages, notifications, and your own member tab. That means that weird “Friend” tab you’d click on just to see who was online is now gone, as is the not so useful “Search” tab.

Here’s a look at how your server list will look on the new app. Look how clean and easy to understand those tabs are! 

Under the “Messages” tab, you’ll find all your group and individual direct messages and not just your friend’s statuses (i.e., if they’re in a voice channel or playing a group activity).

Media sharing should also be quicker and easier in the new app. Discord gives users a 25MB free file upload limit, and tweaks like a newly organized grid view for photos will likely be easier on the eyes. The mobile app can also now store the recent messages of up to 700 text channels and DMs, which means the app will likely load more quickly — and scrolling will go faster (i.e., no buffer).  

Finally, opening the Discord app should take less time now. The company claims that with the latest update, the app open time is reduced by 43 percent on iOS and 55 percent on Android. Android users can expect fewer crashes. Since the app now caches messages in the background, Discord estimates that it uses four times less data. 

For more on Discord’s new mobile experience, feel free to check out the video below.