FINALLY! Zwift introduces "Return to Home" feature!

The cynic/product guy in me thinks that they held off for so long because they were trying to juice their “activities per active user” metric to show to investors.

“Look at how many times someone rides on Zwift! It’s 12 times per week!”

It’s like how Peloton has the 10-15 minute “stretching workouts” that upload a new Strava item, even though its all part of the same workout session.

If you do a Zwift race in a different world, it splits up the activity file so many times it makes it look like you did 4 zwift rides in a day.

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I like zwift, but there are just so many things wrong with it. My list of niggles and complaints is huge.
Currently, the main thing that is bothering me is that you can’t really organize proper races as a meetup. If I organize a meet up race with a group of friends, I have to select the distance of the race (rather than allowing a specific course to be raced to its banner). As everyone spawns at slightly different locations (could be a couple of hundred metres apart with a big group), everyone has a slightly different finish line. This makes sprint finishes a nightmare - you can race past someone, cross your finish line, and find they ‘won’ as their finish line came before yours.
Zwift don’t really care much for their user base.

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  1. FINALLY
  2. It’s still hilarious that it looks like your only path to the Home screen is deleting or saving a ride. So if you wanted to do route A and then route B, my assumption is that you’ll have two rides? I guess it really only matters for Strava points, but it’s still a funny result that seems to stem from “Well, that was the only way we could get it to work.”
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Hate to go there, but it does make sense. The Valley is all about active users and retention metric…

Food for thought!

Personally for me if I just want to free ride I join a group and when that one is 10-15 min from ending I look at companion app for the next group ride and join it there to continue my ride. It does post 2 files but nothing I can do about that

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Yeah the Zwift UI is stuck in the past with very few updates, only reason I continue to use it is that when doing workouts, turning ERG on and off, and changing the % when in ERG mode, are both one screen press operations, without having to go to sub menus and options, but thats it

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Zwift’s answer to TR AT? :rofl:

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Nice feature. More interesting to me is that this change did not require an obvious update. Zwift has improved their deployment technique. Hopefully this sets the stage for more features that those of us in the peanut gallery think should be easy to implement.

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Absolutely spot on.

Z’s behaviour over zwiftpower and racing in general is another festering wound for me!

TR on the other hand :ok_hand:

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Nothing seemed different on iOS or TVOS today

But…when you’re on zwift, chances are, you are already home…

:blush:

I don’t think they have rolled it out for iOS yet - only PC and Mac.

Used it last night - save a bit of time for my TTT as stayed in the game the whole time without quitting. I joined the pen for the TTT, left and went back into Watopia, did my TT warm up in TR and then went back in the pen just in time before my 9min start delay. All worked smoothly!

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It’s not a client end update (no update to download) they flicked a switch at their end. You’ll notice the difference when you end a ride.

They did state iOS would come later.

This said, iOS has less need for this, since there’s no “exit” concept in iOS apps - so Zwift can’t force you to restart the app. They drop you at the “pre-home” screen, if you want to call it that, where you select the user. You still need to go through device pairing. Not as good as bringing you back to the home screen - the one where you select a world, ride, workout, event etc.

And of course - what would it take to add a Menu button to that home page? But no - Zwift wants to remain that special snowflake app that requires you to start an activity before you can change settings.

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Drives me insane.

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PC and Mac only, others in the future

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But didnt it require an update they just did not call it out in the notes?

Yes, who knows how long it’s been ‘possible’ :man_shrugging:t3:

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Its a Xmas miracle.

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Probably a year. Haha.

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