Four icons in the top row: radio, walkie, who is flying, who is waiting
A phone screen has two thumb corners and a strip along the top, and for a while now we have been quietly overspending the corners. The music radio kept a 260-pixel pill in the bottom right, sitting on the flight action cluster. The walkie-talkie sat right above it. Both were permanently there whether you wanted them or not, and both were exactly where your thumb goes when you are trying to fly.
They are still the same two widgets — same bar, same panel, same tuner, same station list. Nothing about them has been redrawn. What changed is that on a phone they are hidden until you ask for them, and when you do, they appear under the top row instead of over the controls. Each has its own icon up there, next to chat and the notification bell.
The icons carry the one thing the corner bar used to carry: whether the set is on. The radio icon glows amber while something is playing and goes dim when it is off. The walkie glows green while your set is powered and dim when it is not, and it pulses red while somebody is transmitting — that last one matters, because the channel is half-duplex and a busy channel is something you have to wait out rather than talk over. Tap the icon again to put the widget away.
Who is flying, and who is waiting
The other half of this change is about people. A few days ago the topbar grew a 👥 icon for the lobby — the crowd on the welcome screen, plus the attendance history behind it. Useful, but it answered only half the question, and in flight it answered the wrong half: it told a pilot who was not playing, while the actual online roster stayed invisible, because on a phone that widget is collapsed to a counter and then hidden outright on small screens.
Now there are two icons and two lists. One is the online roster: everyone in the world, with their pause and headphone markers, followed by the people still down in the lobby who have the radio or the walkie switched on — the ones you can actually call. That one is always available, in flight and on the ground alike. The other is the lobby itself, and it exists only until your first take-off: once you have flown, the crowd on the welcome screen is no longer your question, even while you are paused. The part of it that still matters to a pilot — who is reachable on the air — is already in the roster.
The roster being available from the welcome screen is the part worth highlighting. Until now, someone landing on the site had no way to see that anybody was up there at all — and "twelve people are flying right now" is about the most persuasive thing this site can say to a visitor who has not pressed Take off yet. The data was always being sent; it simply had nowhere to be shown on a phone.
And a pause button, because Esc is not a thing on a phone
One more gap fell out of this. Pause — the one that actually freezes the aircraft instead of just showing a menu over it — has always been bound to Esc, and a phone has no Esc. So on a phone the flight never stopped: put the handset down for a minute and you come back to a drone that glided into a hill. There was also no way back to the welcome screen at all, which is where the news, the hubs and the Discord link live. And the ⏸ marker other players see next to your name could never light up for you, so to everyone else you were a live pilot hanging motionless in the sky.
There is now a ⏸ icon in the same top row. It does exactly what Esc does: freezes the aircraft where it is, brings the welcome screen back, and tells everyone else you have stepped away. Tapping Take off resumes.
Everything above is touch-only. On a desktop the radio and the walkie are still in their corner, the roster is still in the top right, and the lobby panel is still underneath it — none of those moved.