Your Xbox gets a neat new trick that could save a lot of time

For years, now, every time a popular game got a major update it would be a different story for gamers on PlayStation compared to Xbox. 

On the former platform, you could set your system up to automatically detect the update ahead of time, download it beforehand, and then set it live at the time and date when it was released so that you didn't really miss a beat. On Xbox Series X and Series S though, this option never existed, making for frustrating evenings of logging on, only to discover you have a 30GB update to download before you can play Call of Duty: Warzone, for instance.

But, those days are finally about to end. Xbox's latest software update has added a system to let users pre-download updates, although it still sounds a little manual.

Users will now be able to head to My Games & Apps > Manage > Updates on their console to check if there are any available pre-downloads for their games. If so, they'll be able to initiate them and get them ready. It sounds like games will have to enable the feature, too, since Xbox listed a few that support it already, including Sea of Thieves and Minecraft. 

This means that you'll probably still need to know at least vaguely that there's an update in the pipeline, in order to prompt you to go check on it, so we're hoping there will be some automated setting down the line, to match the PS5's simple system. 

Xbox also confirmed in a blog post detailing the change that it's updated the Xbox mobile app to be more all-encompassing, and that this will now start to be the hub for Game Pass on your phone, too. That means that the Game Pass app's days are now numbered, and new downloads of the app will stop in November, apparently.

Hopefully, that makes for a smooth transition, without the loss of any features – Xbox says that it'll be moving features over gradually, first for beta users and then for everyone.