Microsoft Rolls Out the Xbox One August 2020 Update

Microsoft today announced that it is now rolling out the August 2020 Update for Xbox One and delivering the next Dashboard to Insiders.

“The August Xbox 2020 Update … is rolling out soon to all customers,” Microsoft’s Jonathan Hildebrandt writes in the announcement post. “It includes a variety of improvements, including bigger changes like a new landing page for the Xbox Guide, to smaller, more subtle improvements like individual volume sliders for party members.”

The August 2020 Update is perhaps more notable because it sets the stage for the new Dashboard design that will also be used by the Xbox Series X and across the various Xbox apps on other platforms. And while this update won’t deliver some of the more major Dashboard updates we’ll see in the future, it does have a few changes that were among those Microsoft unveiled last week, including:

Improved Guide landing page. The Guide landing page has been redesigned to be cleaner and easier to read, with a new layout that makes it easier to navigate between the most recent things you were doing, the Dashboard, and My Games and Apps.

New notifications inbox. The new notifications inbox is now available via the notification bell on the bottom of the Guide. “This inbox combines all your alerts, game invites and message notifications into a single feed,” Microsoft notes.

Improved Parties and Chats. Following the June combining of Parties and Chats into a single tab, this latest update adds text previews of new messages and individual volume controls for each party member.

Improved Activity Feed. The Activity Feed gets a new layout that focuses on shared content like screenshots, video clips, and posts.

But the bigger news, perhaps, is that Xbox Insiders will soon receive a visual update to match the Dashboard changes that will also come to Xbox Series X.