Nobody seems to keep a secret better than Disney. Why can’t they at least narrow things down by quarter? 2022 could be tomorrow or Jan 31 12 months from now. I honestly was expecting them to show up in the app already, but hoping by Jan 15.
It’s not so much a secret as that they don’t even know themselves. They’re still trying to get G+ / LL$ operating smoothly before adding in another element.
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I just recently ordered some for an upcoming stay. This info is currently seen in my own account:
So really, the aim was late 2021?
In the screenshot, that is the phone app that they are talking about.
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Ah, I guess I see what you are saying. I guess the supposed interplay with magicbands confused me! I still wonder what that was they would unveil “later in 2021” and why it says that now on their website?
I really would just like to use my old school magic bands. Are they going to make these obsolete once MB+ comes out? These look fun and all but I see all sort of techy issues with them (on top of what issues standard MBs have.)
They said they would still offer the older version.
I don’t really care for the look of the new ones. Maybe it will grow on me?
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Do we know what the MB+ ones look like?
Or do you mean the current offerings aren’t your style?
There are pics in the announcement.
I had to google it. Hadn’t even heard about this till your post 
They do look chunkier.
And I presume that the screen is so chunky as it’s something I’m supposed to be fixated on
I guess so.
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Since they are supposed to interact with the 50th statues, I have to think that they are already late.
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I agree. I don’t understand why they don’t enable the features on the phone app now. There is nothing the phone can’t do that another device can. NFC and RFID are on a phone. The phone can vibrate, and if an app is open, it can display a lit full screen in a certain color. I think there is a lot of frustration with guests that Disney has no problem still increasing prices, while they take away benefits (free magic bands, fastpass, magical express) and have half the things in the parks not working.
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I can assure you, it isn’t so simple. (This is my area of expertise.)
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Can you elaborate? I am a EE and have developed a couple of phone apps, but am far from an expert and there is always a gotcha when you go to really thinking it through. An example is the bands that they had for a while at concerts that could blink colors. They use an infrared transmitter so that all the bands in an enclose area could sync to to the signal. And NFC and RFID both have range issues.
The trouble is developing a phone app that can accommodate all the variations of NFC and Bluetooth implementations out there. Plus, for example, with Android, if the app is not actively running in memory, it can’t necessarily access the Bluetooth functionality well enough to simulate a Magic Band. The Magic Band is “always transmitting”, but on the phone, if you failed to launched the app ahead of time, it might not have initialized the BT LE in a way that keeps it transmitting correctly.
I’m not saying it can’t be done…but that it isn’t trivial. Getting it to work for one phone in a given scenario is okay. But getting it to work across multiple scenarios?
Plus, for the NFC side, it has to play nicely with the OS. Apple would be easier than Android, as with Android there are countless variations, plus plenty of Android OS phones that don’t even have NFC. Up until about 3 months ago, none of my phones (all Android) have had NFC. My new phone has NFC now, but even then, to use NFC, you have to put it into the right mode because it really needs to integrate with the Google Pay ecosystem.
Thanks. I’ve run up against a lot of security issue too, things that old apps could do, but an OS upgrade prevents. They have removed or moved things in the API that have been pretty frustrating. We have a model railroad control app and they removed a simple way to get the SSID of the connected network. Now we have to loop through all the found networks to search for a certain string. One of those “gotchas”.
I just saw this today. I have searched fairly often and this didn’t come up before. Maybe A February release date?
https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/guest-services/magicband-plus/
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