NetPass Anniversary and v1.0.0 release
As some of you might know, today is the one-year anniversary of NetPass! To celebrate that, after hours and hours, days and days, months and months of development, soru is happy to announce that finally NetPass v1.0.0 is released!
v1.0.0 Release
This release comes with a slue of new features:
- User on-boarding: Upon startup up NetPass the user will now be asked to review our rules and privacy policy. After that, the user will be on-boarded easily to apply the patches to make SPR (receiving passes in the background) properly.
- Stand-alone: NetPass is now completely stand-alone and does not need Pretendo to work anymore. You can, of course, still use Pretendo if you want to. The two do not conflict.
- Integrations: You don't want to use only NetPass'es SPR but also Pretendo's? That is easy now, just go to the integration settings and then enable Pretendo!
- Background music: You all have been asking for this, and waiting for this, and now it is finally here! NetPass now plays music in the background! This music is also different per-location, however not many locations have their own track yet. Stay tuned for more updates regarding this!
- More accurate interpretation of StreetPasses: StreetPass has a lot of features, some of them rather obscure and not a lot of titles use this. Now, more of the obscure features of streetpass should work properly, broadening the supported titles.
- Special Miis: If you are doing a recurring donation, you can now have the NetPass server automatically mark your Mii in Mii Plaza as special. Miis that were marked special via other means will automatically be marked as normal Miis. (see below for more information)
- Various small features and fixes: A lot of small bugs/issues have been fixed, along with also some bigger ones. Also some smaller features like an in-app about screen exist now!
- Stability: This is a big one: Soru considers NetPass so far into development now that it is stable enough to not have any major bugs anymore (hopefully....you know how it is with software >.<)
Donations / Subscriptions
Of all these changes, the donations for special Miis is probably the most controversial one. So, let's shed some more light on the reasoning for this: For long now soru has been advertising for people to donate over at
LiberaPay, however barely anything is coming in. Soru isn't in the best financial situation and the servers to keep NetPass up and running aren't exactly free.
Additional to this, soru wanted to do something with special Miis since quite some time. Having it be able that literally anyone marked their Mii as special made them feel, well, less special. But, soru also recognizes that they are imperative to some of the minigames and whatnot, so she didn't want them to go away altogether.
Given these two things, soru thought why not combine them together? It'll be even more userfriendly as the person who sets their mii to special does not have to do that on their console, meaning they won't get all the bugs associated with that. The server just marks the Mii as special for you.
This will be available with a recurring donation of 5€/mo. Yes, soru knows that is a rather high pricepoint, however the primary part should be to help NetPass stay out and stay afloat. The marking Miis as special is basically a little thank-you gift ^-^
So, how does this work? You have to
log in on the website. You have to do this with a 3DS, the website will give you instructions how to. After that, you can attach other accounts of yourself to the profile, so that you don't need to have your 3DS around to log in. Next, you can select the subscription. You will be re-directed to
Stripe, which soru decided to use to process payments. After that, you will automatically get the permissions to mark your mii as special. You will see on the user page of the website a new checkbox to set that for your 3DS. You are also free to add multiple of your 3DSes and mark them all as special.
If you need any help or have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out for help!
Other things
So....yeah, we have a website now! It is available at:
https://netpass.cafe This website also holds our
FAQ, Rules and
Privacy Policy. Fun fact, this website will work just fine on your 3DS (both old and new models)!
Looking Forward
This last year has been absolutely amazing, soru could have never imagined that NetPass would grow so big so quickly. It went from a technical demo to an actual working application that tens of thousands use! We currently have 28 thousand unique monthly active users. This is just insane to soru! Additionally, just shy of 2 million (1.92M) messages are being sent every 15 days. Soru could have never dreamed such popularity; thank you every single one of you who went on this journey and continues to do so!
So, with all this, what does the future of NetPass hold? Actually, quite a lot more! The long promised UI-update isn't ready yet for this release, but that doesn't mean wouldn't ever come! Sun/Moon is working hard on this, and soru is looking forward to seeing this being completed.
But hey, that's not all! Soru decided to start looking into SpotPass and see if she can re-implement that for NetPass, too. This is so that things like sending a swapnote to a specific user would work. Or in Tomodachi Life, having a traveler send messages back home. So far, no real work has been done on this, as soru wanted to focus on v1.0.0 first. But, she thinks this is the next logical step for NetPass and it seems fun for soru to work on.
With the new integrations feature other, third-party projects about StreetPass can plug into NetPass. For example, someone could make a browser plugin to have people pass who visit the same website within a certain amount of time. Or, a VR Chat plugin that would use proximity in VR Chat to have two people pass. The possibilities are endless! If you are interested in developing such a thing, please reach out.
Furthermore, there are various other projects / features that soru is bouncing around in her head. None are concrete enough to talk about them yet. But this shows that NetPass is far from done, and is here to stay for the forseable future.
Thank you everyone who is joining along this amazing adventure, on to another year of awesomeness!
))) just wondering about swapnote, im trying to send a note to my friend (on my friends list, sent from streetpass, both on pretendo and netpass servers) and it isnt working, i hear when you send notes it goes to everyone, im a little lost! 
