Writing a year-in-review post in November feels premature, but we've always published this one before the holiday season gets busy — because the holiday season is when remote game nights happen, and if something we shipped this year is going to help with that, we want people to know about it before they're already setting up their tables.
2025 was a year of working on the things that quietly break a session: camera setup friction, rooms that weren't private enough, mobile browsers that behaved differently than desktop, a few rough edges in how the game communicated its state to players at critical moments. None of it was flashy. All of it mattered.
Mobile browser improvements
When we started in 2021, the assumption was that most players would be on desktop. That turned out to be partially true — the person hosting, setting up the room, and managing the game is almost always on desktop. But players joining from their phones are far more common than we expected, and the mobile experience had real problems.
Safari on iOS in particular had an inconsistent relationship with WebRTC multi-party video that affected any player joining from an iPhone or iPad. The issue was intermittent — sometimes everything worked, sometimes video from one player would drop mid-session for no apparent reason. We tracked this to how Safari handles WebRTC TURN relay fallback when NAT traversal fails, and spent a significant stretch of early 2025 working through the connection negotiation logic to make the mobile experience more reliable.
The result isn't perfect — mobile WebRTC on cellular connections still has more variance than desktop WiFi — but the crash and drop rate we were seeing on iOS is dramatically lower than it was a year ago. If you tried Lipoker on your phone in 2024 and it was frustrating, it's worth trying again.
Room privacy controls
The password-protect-your-room feature existed from early on, but it was a little hidden. Players creating rooms didn't always notice it, and we heard from groups who found unexpected guests joining their private table because they'd shared the link in a place with broader visibility than they intended.
We redesigned the room creation flow to make privacy controls more prominent. The password field is now in the main room setup screen rather than in an expandable advanced section, and the room creation confirmation shows your privacy status clearly before you get the shareable link. We also added a max-players cap — you can now set a room to close to new joiners once your intended group is seated, which addresses the "unexpected guest" problem from a different angle.
Small UX changes like this are easy to undervalue. But the number of game nights that went sideways because of a confusion about who was in the room made this one of the more important things we shipped this year.
Clearer game state communication
Poker has a lot of information that players need at a glance: whose turn it is, what the current bet is, how much is in the pot, what the last action was. When multiple players are on video simultaneously and the action is moving quickly, keeping all of that readable and clear is genuinely hard.
We did a pass on the table interface with a specific focus on moments of confusion — the river card is down, there's a big bet, two players are tanking, and someone in the chat is asking "wait, who's next?" Those moments are usually a readability failure, not a rules failure. Players know the rules; they just can't find the relevant number in the interface fast enough.
The cleaner action indicator, better contrast on active player highlighting, and the revised pot display were all responses to that feedback. Nothing that changes how the game works, but changes that make the game easier to follow in the moments where following it matters most.
What we didn't get to
Honest accounting: there are things on our list from earlier in 2025 that didn't ship. A second poker variant — we've been thinking about Omaha — didn't get far enough along to release in a state we were happy with. A spectator mode, which would let people watch a game without being dealt in, was requested several times and is still on the queue. Custom chip values so that groups who want to run their own point system can do that — also still in progress.
We're a small team building something we genuinely enjoy. The constraint is time and focus, not interest. These items will get there.
Where we're headed
The thing that continues to drive what we build is a simple observation: the best moments in the sessions we hear about from players aren't about poker. They're about being in contact with people they care about, and poker is the frame that makes that contact feel different from another video call.
A friend group that moved to different cities after college and schedules a Lipoker night every few weeks has a thing they do together that isn't just catching up. A remote team that ends their quarterly all-hands with a game night has a shared experience that sticks. A few cousins scattered across time zones who pull out their phones on Christmas Eve for a hand or two before bed — that's what we're actually building for.
Everything we shipped in 2025 was in service of making those sessions work better: fewer technical surprises, clearer game state, more control over your room. That work continues into next year. The goal hasn't changed since 2021 — get the table talk back into online poker, keep the friction as low as it can be, and make it easy for people who want to be at the same table to be there.
Thank you for playing Lipoker this year. See you at the table.