Communities. A channel you are alone in can become a community, from "Make channel into a community" in its Settings. Anybody with its link can join, up to twenty members, without becoming anybody's contact, and what is said and recorded in it stays with its members. You own it: you alone invite people, decide what plays and what is recorded, name it, remove people and delete it. The community link opens a page with its name, its description and how to join; Reset link, or a new name, stops the old one working. A channel with a public page is now a podcast: "This channel is a podcast" in Settings. A podcast's and a community's Settings have Open page, and the channel's header says which it is. When something you do in a channel does not go through, the channel says so, and why. In a watch party, every press acts at once for everybody. The watch card has Open in YouTube, in place of Copy video link. The paste button stays put after the app has been in the background. Add a contact's field says Email address.

Pasting a link no longer asks "Allow Paste?". Each paste button is now iOS's own Paste control, with what it does written beneath it. With nothing copied, it says what to copy first. The lock screen card has Out, which steps you out of the room. Open is gone; tapping the card still opens the channel. A Short stays upright in full screen, whichever way the phone is held. A film goes on playing through a brief loss of connection on the device showing it. A profile says "Request sent" as soon as you tap Add contact, and "Pinged" appears on everybody's People straight away. When an invitation cannot be accepted, the reason is given in Spanish as well as English. Help ends with the app's version and build number.

A channel's members can remove one of their own, and it takes two of them. "Move to remove them" is at the foot of a member's profile; nothing happens until another member agrees, within a day. The person removed is told it happened and not who decided, and anybody can invite them back. A channel of two cannot remove anybody. While you are in a room on one device, Home on your others pins it at the top: "On another device". The Notepad tab is now Clipboard. What the notepad said is the channel's Description, in the channel's Settings under Public page, and it is shown only while the channel has a public page. A chime sounds when a film starts and another when it stops, since the room's microphones close while it plays. Pausing a film gives everybody their microphone back at once. People says "not watching" beside anybody in the room with the film on none of their devices. A film resumes in step with the room on every device, and tapping the picture in the corner always opens it. The floor can be claimed whenever no film is playing. A guest made a member while in the room stays in the conversation, muted unless they were already speaking. A bar on Home naming one invitation opens its channel, and one naming one contact request opens that person. "In the app now" under a contact means they are using it, not only that it is open somewhere.

The Floor speaks Spanish. Floor Settings has a Language card - Automatic, English, Español - and the choice follows your account to every device you sign in on. A channel can have a public page. Public page is on the channel's Settings; the page carries the channel's name, its notepad and the conversations published on it, and a feed podcast apps can subscribe to. No member is named on it, ever. Cover art, a category and a language are there for podcast directories. A conversation goes onto that page only once everybody who was in it has agreed, one at a time, from "I agree this can be published" on the recording's card. Any one of them can take their agreement back, and that takes it down. Home has a Podcasts tab, listing every channel that has a public page. Everybody in a channel is told, once, that it has one. A contact can be asked into a channel as a guest rather than as a member: Guest and Member sit on each row of the Invite tab. A seat offered to somebody with an account opens in the app. A channel holds six members and forty guests, two of whom can hold the microphone. Home says in words what is waiting for you, above the lists, and one tap answers it. Accepting a contact request opens the channel it makes. A channel's first tab is called People. Notice that somebody has stepped into a channel stops being sent to an account that has gone a week without opening the app, and starts again the moment it does. An invitation, a ping and an accepted contact go on arriving. A channel remembers what it was watching, so the Watch tab can put the film back on without the link. A film that has run out can be started again, and a watch party survives the server restarting, coming back paused where it was. The film moves between your devices while it is playing, and Home says when it is on another one, where a tap brings it here. A member card reading Nearby offers Ping.

Watch something together is on every channel's Watch tab, and plays the YouTube link on your clipboard. The film plays in the app. Its picture stays up while you go Home, open a setting or look at another channel, and it can be dragged to whichever corner suits you. Full screen is on the Watch tab, and turning the phone sideways is full screen too. This device and Other device say where the film plays. Sending it to your other device opens the channel there and gives that device the picture, the transport and the rungs, and nothing else. Anybody watching can play, pause, and go back or forward fifteen seconds, from the app's row of controls or from the film's own bar. The floor governs the microphone and not the film. The Watch tab says what the film is called and who is watching it. Swipe right in a channel to reach Home, and left on Home to go back into the room you are standing in. While you are standing in a channel, the lock screen carries a card with Mute and a tap that opens the channel. Three rising notes sound on every device present when somebody starts a recording by hand. A channel's sounds are heard whether or not the ringer switch is on. Choose where sound comes out is on Floor Settings. The Player tab is called Listen, and takes a file of up to 200MB. The Channels list says when the app cannot reach the server.

A channel makes a sound when somebody steps in and a different one when they step out, heard by everybody there except the person it is about. Somebody saying they are nearby has a note of its own. Tapping a notification opens the channel it is about. Home's Contacts tab wears a mark when somebody has asked to be your contact, and Support wears one when an answer to a question you asked has come back. A channel's first tab is called Members. Record works in a channel where you are the only one present, as long as a microphone is open or a track is playing. Record automatically starts a run in the same case. Ping is offered only while you are in a channel or nearby it. Show the checklist again is on Floor Settings, under Getting started, where every account can reach it. The getting-started list stays on Home while you are standing in a channel. Floor Settings has an Email section, On or Off, for occasional email about how to use The Floor and what has changed in it. Signing up offers the same choice as a checkbox beside your display name. Sign-in codes arrive either way. Somebody who arrives with nobody here is put into one channel, Getting Started Cohort and a number, with up to three other people who joined around the same time and one of the people who run The Floor. It happens when notifications are turned on, once, and nobody in it becomes a contact. An invitation in the Channels list says who asked you in. The channel screen no longer carries a card about your microphone. An Audio card appears only when the connection needs attention.

Nearby is a state you can now choose. The bar at the bottom of a channel has three buttons, In, Nearby and Out, beside Mute and Claim. Nearby opens no microphone and plays no sound, but when somebody steps into the channel you are told who it is and offered Step in or Stay nearby. You can be nearby in up to five channels at once, and Home shows which ones. Stepping into one channel leaves you nearby in the rest. Nearby lasts fifteen minutes; tap it again to start it over. Stepping into a channel now stops whatever else your phone is playing, so that you hear anybody who speaks. Choose Nearby instead to stay within reach without that. A channel now has tabs: Roster, Notepad, Invite, Player and Recordings. Home, Settings and the recording indicator sit above them. The indicator stays on screen whichever tab you are on, and shows that a recording is running and how long it has been going. Record automatically is a new switch in a channel's Settings. With it on, the channel starts recording by itself. Stop still stops it. Notepad is a plain text note for the channel. Tap Edit to write in it. The shared clipboard is on the same tab, above it. The Player's buttons are Change, Share and Remove. Share saves a copy of the track to your phone. Export is called Share everywhere now, including on recordings. Home has three lists: Channels, Contacts and Support. Help and Chip in are on Support. Help lets you write a question, and the answer appears under it the next time you open the screen. A getting-started list appears on Home: Get somebody here, Step in with somebody, Claim the floor, Say you are nearby, Bring in a guest, Play something together. Tapping one takes you to where it is done, and the cross beside it takes it off the list. The app explains what notifications are for before iOS asks for them, and it asks later than it used to instead of just after you sign up. There is a new one: you are told when somebody accepts your invitation or your contact request. When somebody pings you, what they wrote is shown on their profile for as long as the ping lasts. New accounts are given a name and a username made from the email address used to sign in. You can change both. Add a contact offers both ways on one screen: send a request to an email address, or share an invite link. The link goes through the usual share sheet. The floor's countdown is now on the person. Whoever holds it has their minute counting down on their row, and your own row shows how long before you can claim it again. If somebody speaks while the floor is claimed you can see that they are talking, even though you cannot hear them. The setting "Hide the repeated channel controls" is gone, and so are the cards it hid. The buttons at the bottom of the screen are the only place those controls appear.

The Floor runs on iPad. Above a certain width the list stays beside whatever you have open, so opening a channel or a profile no longer takes the list off the screen, and the window takes all four orientations and shares the screen with another app. Home holds both lists. Channels and Contacts are a switch on one screen, under the title, Settings and the channel you are present in, which stay pinned while the list scrolls. Start a channel and Add a contact are the first row of their list, and contact requests are on Contacts. Close and Settings are drawn as a cross and a gear, in every header that has them. You can choose a username on your profile — five characters or more, letters, digits and underscores — and Contacts then offers Copy Invite Link. The link seats one person: the first to open it becomes your contact outright, and it lasts thirty days. Invitations sent to an email address carry it too. Transcripts and watch parties are behind a new setting, "Show experimental features", under Labs in Settings, and it is off to begin with. Until you turn it on, Transcribe is not on a recording and "Watch something together" is not in a channel. Two settings have new names, each naming what turning it on does. "Tap a channel to step in" is now "Tap a channel to look, not step in", and "Repeat the channel controls as cards" is now "Hide the repeated channel controls". What you had chosen is kept. The Headphones setting "Keep the connection steady" is gone, and headphones now hold the speaking connection whenever there is audio in the channel, for everybody. Stepping into a quiet channel leaves whatever else you are playing running. If something else is playing while you would be waiting alone in a channel, you are stepped out to Nearby rather than held there present. Anybody present in a channel can mute anybody else, from their profile. It is a favour rather than moderation, and it only goes one way: nobody can open a microphone but their own. Somebody muted takes it straight back in one tap, from the control already in front of them, and for a minute afterwards nobody else can mute them again. Whoever holds the floor cannot be muted at all. A channel where nobody is speaking and nothing is playing steps everybody out after fifteen minutes, so it stops reading as occupied to the people who are not in it. In a browser, a tab nobody has touched for fifteen minutes steps itself out. Having the app open counts as attention for as long as it is open, so reading a channel keeps you present in it. Somebody stepping in and speaking is audible while your phone is locked and the app is in the background.

The Floor now runs in a web browser at thefloor.rvanegas.co, with your channels, the floor, and your recordings. Opening a channel there while you are already in it on your phone offers to step you in, and steps you out of the phone. The channel screen has been rebuilt. Mute, the floor, and stepping in or out are now in a bar pinned to the bottom of the screen, reachable without scrolling, and the channel name, Home and Settings are pinned to the top — as they now are on Home and Contacts. The cards between them have been reordered, with the floor first, directly under the list of people. A new setting, "Repeat the channel controls as cards", turns the repeated cards off and leaves the bar. Guests can be added as contacts. Anyone in a channel can ask someone who joined through a guest link to become a contact, and they answer on the guest page without leaving the conversation, creating an account there if they need one. Each member's request is answered separately. Opening a guest link for a channel you already belong to now takes you in as yourself. Contacts and profiles have a new layout. Add contact is the first row, your own card is below it, and editing your name and bio is behind an Edit button on your profile. A profile leads with whether the person is about, then with the ways to reach them. Your own profile shows the email address you are signed in with, and you can change it: enter a new address and confirm it with the code sent there. The channels you share with someone are listed on their profile, tapping one takes you there, and the one you are in is marked. Ping is now offered for contacts only. Declining an invitation leaves the channel, after asking you to confirm, on every device. Home counts other people. The time under each channel is when someone other than you was last in it, and channels are sorted by that. The floor is released as soon as the person holding it disconnects, and disconnections are detected in five to seven seconds. The roster shows when someone is present but no longer sending audio, and you can ping them in that state. Appearance, tap to step in, and the new channel controls setting now follow your account, applying on every device you are signed in to and changing on all of them at once. A new Headphones setting, "Keep the connection steady", holds Bluetooth headphones on the speaking connection for as long as you are in a channel, so nothing switches when somebody starts talking.

Watch something together. Paste a YouTube link into a channel and everyone gets the same clock: play, pause and seek reach all of you at once. The phone is the remote. The video plays on a page you open on a laptop or a tablet, in YouTube's own player, and it follows the room by itself. Whoever holds the floor decides what plays. You can mute the room for the film and unmute by pausing it. Recordings can be transcribed. Ask for one and the text arrives beside the recording, split by who was speaking, with a way to name the voices and to say that two of them are the same person. Search a channel for a word and it finds the moment. Whatever was played into the room is transcribed too, on its own track, so a voice cannot hide the music. Your first transcript is free. Tap a contact and you get their profile: every channel you share, when they were last in each one, and a way to go straight there. You can hand them your email address, and copy theirs if they have handed you theirs. You can be signed in on more than one device now. Your voice is in one place at a time, and stepping into a channel on the phone steps you out of it on the tablet. Notifications no longer buzz the device you are already talking on. Settings has "Sign out other devices" for the one you left behind. If you declined the notifications prompt and later changed your mind, that now works. Turn them on in iOS Settings and the app notices as soon as you come back to it, rather than at the next launch — which could be days away, so notifications had a way of staying off long after you had switched them on. Removing a contact is a quiet row at the foot of their card rather than a red button in the middle of it.

Guests. You can now bring someone in who doesn't have The Floor. Share a link, they knock from their browser, and anyone in the room can let them in - with the floor, the same as everybody else. Every channel has a clipboard. One piece of text, there for everyone in the channel to read, replace or clear. Notifications are quieter, and you choose how quiet. Only a ping - somebody asking for you by name - makes a sound. Each channel has its own setting if you want to hear everything, or nothing at all. A ping now reaches you even when the app is already open, and nothing else can bump it off your lock screen. A floor claim now lasts a minute rather than three. Three minutes was chosen before anyone had used it, and everyone else is muted for the whole of it. Your phone buzzes if you're silenced while you're still talking, so you find out without looking at it. Home says how quiet each channel is, so the ones worth stepping into come first. And if you'd rather look before you walk in, there's a setting that makes tapping a channel open it without entering it. Recordings upload with a progress bar and a way to stop. Better audio throughout: muting no longer restarts the audio engine, the output picker no longer offers an output that can't record you, and the speaking dot goes out when the sound does rather than when the person leaves.

Home is now a list of your channels, ordered by how quiet each one is, so the conversation you are most likely to want sits at the top. A new Contacts view, with whoever is around at the top, and a way to read your own profile the way a contact sees it. Availability is measured by evidence now rather than inferred — the roster says who is actually in the app. You can ping someone who is not there from inside a channel. An unnamed channel widens to include someone new instead of moving the conversation elsewhere.