Sober Happenings: June 2026

[existentials]

Nothing ever happens. People miss when we used to announce updates and pretend like something happened. Here goes.

Sober 1.7.1

Over the coming days, we'll roll out Sober 1.7.1. Those numbers probably mean nothing to you, and that's because we made them up. Here's a rundown of the recent changes in Sober; some of these might take a bit to roll out.

Make the UI act closer to desktop Roblox

If you're on a desktop, Roblox will act the part. This includes the "captures" feature, video playback for experience trailers, and even in-experience video playback.

We added an option to revert to a mobile UI in case you're playing on some sort of weird phone thing for some reason.

Server Location Indicator feature, now in the settings page

It's a good feature we've had for a while, now officially supported. Blame the server being far away for your skill issues.

In-experience notifications, party features, and warnings

You'll get all notifications and experience invites. For better or for worse.

Get rid of lagspikes when first opening textboxes

We plan to fix broken rendering of some non-Latin scripts too. But I've been promising that for a while now.

Get rid of rare random lagspikes while in-experience

If you keep having performance issues, file a bug report. We're committed to improving Sober's performance, even beyond what regular Roblox can achieve.

Fix graphics driver-related crashes, especially on Vulkan default renderer

Old Nvidia drivers are still the bane of my existence. If you have a driver older than 590, please just update it already.

Close on leave feature, now live

Enable it to close the app when leaving an experience instead of showing the homepage. Also, we fixed the "Exit" button in the Roblox app itself. We plan to add even more ways to close the app so you can finally escape.

Browser login, now live

When you visit an experience from the browser, Sober will log you in automatically like any other Roblox client. This also replaces the account switcher feature that got removed when we switched to the desktop UI; use the browser to switch accounts.

We're working on ARM support

Sober will soon run on your Raspberry PI, Pinephone, and even Mac with Asahi Linux. This will take a bit more work, so expect it next month.

Roblox Android Remote Attestation

Roblox has been testing a new anticheat feature: Android Remote Attestation. Experience developers have to opt into it.

It cryptographically verifies the app is unmodified and running on official software. This is great for cheat prevention, because it lets Roblox attest the app and runtime environment are unmodified. Of course, this is fully incompatible with Sober, because we can't manifest a physical Android security chip out of thin air.

Rivals (the Roblox game) entered the beta for this feature, which is how we even know about it. They lost a couple thousand legitimate players and decided to revert.

You see: beyond just stopping Sober users unintentionally, the Android Attestation feature doesn't work on older devices, or devices that aren't certified by Google in some way. For the first time ever, outdated Android devices are good for something; most experiences won't take the hit in playerbase to enable the feature. Sober will keep working on most games. At least I hope and think so.

If the feature is widely deployed, we have an ace up our sleeve: switch to the MacOS client. But that comes with its own challenges.

We're committed to providing Roblox on Linux while respecting all safety and security features. Oh hey, that's what the next section is about. It's the section where I give experience developers a reason to not block us with that new feature. So classy.

Safety at Sober

Sober employs its own Linux-specific security software to prevent malicious app modifications. This keeps your account safe and stops bad actors before they can even reach the Sober interoperability layer. We make bot farms unfeasible with Sober: one game instance per machine, always.

No system is perfect, especially when Linux is designed to be as modifiable as possible, but we're committed to improving upon Roblox's client security architecture.

The weakest link matters: to keep Sober users safe, we steer clear entirely of platforms known to be problematic in terms of security, such as NPM or GitHub actions, or agentic coding platforms that pile on mountains of code that you can't possibly audit.

Safety, civility, and security are interlinked. We employ proactive moderation for all our communities to remove bad actors. We hold ourselves and our team of volunteers to high standards of code quality and overall conduct.

Sober's Scale

We choose to not bundle usage telemetry into our clients, however we have a rough idea, on the low-end.

• Every week, hundreds of thousands of passionate and tech-literate users visit experiences using Sober
• Downloaded over 2 million times, Sober drives engagement and play from users most passionate with learning about technology
• While the numbers are low in comparison to other official Roblox clients, we open a gateway to Roblox for some of the most dedicated and impactful players
• Each day, hundreds of top developers use Sober and Vinegar to build businesses, learn programming, and make their creative vision come true

See you next time

See you at the next "Sober Happenings" snapshot. This has been fun, and also a lot of yap. I used AI for none of this. If I sound like AI, it's because I have as much character depth as ChatGPT anyway.

[shalommies]

Much love to the return of the changelog. Adding a separate 'updates' channel in VinegarHQ would be beneficial to the server as well, since people are already there for the helpdesk.

[iamthefuckingcat]

nothing ever happens