How to Fix a Friends List or Presence Not Updating

Stale friends presence is unreliable update handling. Subscribing to changes fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Subscribe to presence updates

Subscribe to presence change events from the platform or your backend so the list updates when a friend's status changes, rather than fetching once and showing stale status indefinitely.

2. Refresh on relevant events

Refresh presence when the friends list opens, when the player comes online, and on reconnect, so the status is current at the moments players look at it.

3. Reconcile periodically

Periodically reconcile the full list against authoritative presence to correct any missed updates, so the list does not slowly drift out of date from lost individual update events.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.