Xbox users will no longer be able to use their console's social clubs as of April 2026, as Microsoft has announced that it will permanently end the feature. After this feature is removed, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, or Xbox Series S players will not be able to access social clubs through the Friends & Community Updates app on their Xbox consoles. Currently, users cannot create new social clubs in anticipation of the feature being removed in the coming months.
Social Clubs offered Xbox users a way to connect with others over their favorite games through user-created “clubs” where they could post discussion threads, screenshots, and other media. Clubs could be created for all kinds of communities, allowing players to find like-minded players for multiplayer games or to get help with various game activities. Anyone interested in experiencing Xbox Social Clubs one last time will have to do so before they end for good in April.
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Xbox consoles will remove the Social Clubs feature in April 2026
According to the official Xbox FAQ page, Social Clubs will be removed as part of the company's “focus on the social experiences that gamers use most today.” The Social Clubs feature seems to be one of the less used social apps available to Xbox players, which warrants Xbox to reevaluate its commitment to maintaining the feature in the future. No other alternative has been announced at this time, with the Xbox FAQ post suggesting that players are using other ways to connect with players, such as Xbox Messages, Xbox Discord, Party Chat, and Looking for a Group.
Drag your weapons to fill the grid
Start
Drag your weapons to fill the grid
Easy to medium hard
One gripe with this update is that only user-created social clubs seem to be on the chopping block. Official clubs for individual games are confirmed to stick, so developers can interact with their communities. These clubs will not be found in the Friends and Community Updates app and will instead be located under the game card for their specific game.
Xbox Removing social clubs comes at a bad time
Despite low user interaction with Xbox's Social Club feature, its removal comes at a time when other social networks are under fire from users. Discord recently announced changes to its age verification system coming in March 2026 that will require some users to upload an ID or complete a face scan to access certain age-restricted content, which has sparked a strong backlash from users. While the Xbox Social Clubs feature doesn't necessarily work as a replacement for Discord's voice chat, it could have been a potential alternative to Discord for users to share artwork and screenshots related to the games they're playing. Discord has since clarified that most users will not be subject to these stricter age verification guidelines, but some users have already begun looking for an alternative platform for Xbox to use with Social Clubs.
Social Clubs is just the latest feature to be disabled on Xbox consoles, which have seen several other notable apps removed in recent years, including:
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Upload Studio – support ended in 2020
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Avatar Editor App — End of support in January 2025
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Movies and TV shows for purchase – support ends in July 2025
Not every retired app on Xbox consoles is completely gone, and some of these features still exist in one form or another. The original Xbox avatars still exist in supported Xbox 360 games, and users still have access to movies and TV shows purchased before the service ended support, but the way these features have been released over the past few years shows a clear new direction for Xbox's future, which aims to streamline usability by trimming some of the console's less-used features. Now Social Clubs joins the list of Xbox apps that have become shells of their former selves.
