I use Wifi mostly these days and I’ve noticed that it shows up immediately on the Radar screen during search. But I usually need to wait another 6-7 seconds until the search is complete before tapping Wifi and connecting. This seems like it could be avoided by just allowing us to tap the radar screen instead.
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I totally agree with this, in previous version connection was much faster!
Agreed. Not horrible, but it does take a while to stop.
Yeah, honestly — we feel this one too. Watching your server pop up on the radar and then sitting there for another 6–7 seconds is one of the more obviously wasteful moments in the whole connection flow.
Quick bit of history: we actually shipped tap-to-connect-on-appearance for exactly this reason, and ended up rolling it back. Here’s why.
What’s actually happening in those 6–7 seconds
The WiFi icon appearing is just the first signal in a bunch of stuff running in parallel:
- Discovery is still listening. You might only have one server, but bigger studios broadcast three or four. The radar can’t commit until it’s seen what else is on the network — including making sure it’s not racing two devices with the same name on different subnets.
- Auto-connect is making decisions. If you were previously connected to a specific server, MetaGrid wants to reconnect to that one, not a different host with the same friendly name. It needs the search to settle enough to tell them apart.
- Old host entries are aging out. Yesterday’s sessions, ghost entries from a Mac that slept and woke on a different network, etc. All of that has to clear so the radar isn’t showing you something that no longer exists.
- Identity, version, and capabilities are being negotiated. MetaGrid confirms it’s talking to a compatible MetaServer build with the right integrations before committing to a connection it would otherwise have to immediately tear down.
- Reachability is being sanity-checked. A computer with Ethernet + WiFi + a Thunderbolt bridge + a VPN can advertise itself on a network it can’t actually accept connections from. Invisible until you try.
Why we rolled tap-to-connect-on-appearance back
Tapping the second the icon appeared meant committing to all of those decisions before any of them had finished. We were seeing:
- A noticeable rate of failed connections
- Races between auto-connect and manual taps
- “Ghost” connections that looked alive on the iPad but were already abandoned on the server side
A tap that bounces you back to Searching… — or worse, a connection that appears to work but silently misbehaves later — turned out to feel worse than the wait.
Where we’re at
Straight answer: we’re not planning to revisit this in the near term. The current behavior trades 6–7 seconds of waiting for a connection that, when it lands, lands cleanly — and across the whole install base, that’s the right side of the tradeoff.
That said, your note is on file. If we ever come back to this, the goal would be exactly what you described: appearance instant, tap enabled the moment the host is truly ready — not when the full search completes.
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