FestivalPilot Pro used to come as an annual subscription only. That works well if you’re out at several festivals across the season. It works badly if you go to one festival a year and don’t need any of it for the other eleven months. Paying for a year to cover a single weekend feels wrong — and that’s exactly what we heard.

So here’s the Festival Pass

Pick a festival, buy once, done. Every Pro feature is unlocked for that one festival: Live Mode, weather per set and stage, walking times between stages, smart recommendations, push alerts when the schedule changes, packing list, step counter and your recap afterwards.

The pass is active from one day before the festival starts until one day after it ends — so it covers the journey there and back as well.

And the important part: it isn’t a subscription. Nothing renews, nothing needs cancelling, nothing happens in a year’s time. One purchase, one festival.

When is the Season Pass still the better deal?

Simple: from the second festival on. The annual pass unlocks Pro for every festival of the season and costs roughly what two Festival Passes cost. If you’re heading to more than one weekend this summer, it’s cheaper. If you’re not, take the Festival Pass — and pay only for the weekend that actually matters to you.

Both sit side by side in the app. You decide; we won’t push you either way.

What else is new

Live Mode now shows you at a glance what’s playing on every stage — and the weather sits right inside your day plan instead of in a tab of its own. In the stage plan, the set that’s currently playing glows, and recommendations are marked as such. In the festival hub, one tap makes a festival your default. And you can tick off tickets you’ve bought — the prompt disappears with them.

Plus plenty of fresh line-ups: North Sea Jazz, Electric Castle, Vieilles Charrues, Pukkelpop, Sziget, Summer Breeze and Deichbrand 2027.

And now a straight word to everyone on Android

If you’re on an Android device, you won’t be seeing any of this yet. The last version that made it into the Play Store is 2.2, from June. The Band Hub, Live Mode, the Festival Pass — all of it has been stuck in review since then. And there’s no Wear OS app at all so far.

That wasn’t Google’s doing, it was ours. Two things genuinely weren’t right. The access codes reviewers were supposed to use for testing our Pro features had been used up — so they couldn’t get in at all. And our Wear OS app showed anyone without Pro nothing but a prompt to buy, instead of an actual feature. Both were fair objections, and both are fixed: the watch now has a proper free experience, and review access runs through a clean route that can’t expire on us.

For you, that backlog unfortunately also means: two bugs we fixed long ago are still sitting in the version on your phone.

The first one hits setup. On some Android devices the app gets permanently stuck on “step 3 of 4” — if you run into it, FestivalPilot simply doesn’t work at all. We found the cause and fixed it, but the fix lives in exactly the version that isn’t getting through. If you gave up because of it: it wasn’t your device, and the update clears it for you automatically.

The second one hits the data. On 2.2, updates don’t reliably come through. We keep maintaining running orders, correcting set times and adding line-ups — and on Android that currently doesn’t reach you dependably. So if a running order looks wrong to you even though the festival corrected it long ago, that’s neither you nor our data. It’s the version you have installed.

The release currently in review clears all of it in one go: Band Hub, Live Mode, Festival Pass, the fixed setup bug, working data updates — and finally the app for your watch. We’re cautiously optimistic that the backlog ends there.

Thanks for sticking with us. If you’ve been wondering these past weeks why nothing was moving: that was why. And thanks to everyone who reported the setup bug instead of just uninstalling.

What’s next?

We’re already working on the next version, and it’s about what comes after the festival.

Your Wrapped currently covers one festival at a time. Next up you’ll get the whole season in a single image: every festival of the year added together, with the acts you saw, your highlights and the numbers behind them — to share, if you feel like it.

And the per-festival review gets considerably richer: how your ratings were distributed, which day was the strongest, your best and worst moments, a weather recap and a comparison with last year.