New Xbox One Alpha ring preview includes Scheduled Themes and more

Over the weekend, Microsoft released a new Xbox One Insider Preview build to the Alpha ring, 1802.180109-1916. It's the second preview of version 1802, a minor feature update that should be finalized next month. The first one was made available last week in the Preview Alpha ring, and it still hasn't made its way to Beta.

Oddly enough, it's not uncommon for the Xbox Insider team to release builds on Sundays, unlike the Windows Insider team. Interestingly, most builds are released outside of normal business hours, at 6pm Pacific Time.

One of the two new features is Scheduled Themes. The Light Theme was added in the Fall Update, and now, you'll be able to set times to switch between Light and Dark. You can configure this with the following steps:

1. Navigate to Settings > Personalization > Theme & motion.
2. Select Scheduled from the "System theme" dropdown.
3. Select the times at which you want the light theme to start and end.

The other new feature that you'll find is a new icon for the Game Pass Discovery Tile in the Guide. This will provide a surprise Xbox Game Pass tile to provide you with a new game to play. It's unclear if this will still show up for those that don't subscribe to Xbox Game Pass, or if it will just be wasted space.

There are a couple of fixes included in the build as well:

• Screenshots
  Fixed an issue which sometimes caused screenshots to fail to display in Report a problem or on the console.

• Party Chat
  Party chat is now fixed to not crash when in the Guide.

There are also a bunch of known issues to be aware of:

• My Games and Apps
  When downloading and installing games the progress bar and the percentage complete are not in sync and show inaccurate data. The games and apps do install correctly.

• Background Screenshots
  Background screenshots are showing up as 4:3 format rather than 16:9

• Guide/Home crashing
  We are aware of the Guide and Home crashing and determined the root cause. A fix is being worked on.
  Workaround: In the interim please HARD Reboot (Hold the power button for ten seconds)the console to fix this issue.

• System Update
  You may encounter an E105 error when the console starts up after downloading the system update.
  Workaround: Select the Repair option, and the issue should resolve after rebooting the console.

• Games Installation
  Games that are installed fail to launch.
  Workaround: If the games are installed to an external drive please copy the game to the internal drive or attempt to delete the title and redownload to fix the launch error.

• Display
  We are investigating the inaccurate RGB colors that have been reported when displaying in 4K HDR mode when playing a UHD disc.

• Tournaments

  • The left and right navigation for selecting date and time during Tournament creation is currently reversed when the console language is set to Arabic or Hebrew.

  • Left and right navigation in Tournament twists is reversed when the console language is set to Arabic or Hebrew.

  • Left and right navigation in the bracket view of Tournaments is reversed when the console language is set to Arabic or Hebrew

• Avatars on Home

  Users wishing to represent themselves as an avatar can do so by changing their settings under My profile > Customize profile > Show my avatar.

If you're on the Preview Alpha ring, this build is available now. Of course, Alpha is still invitation-only, so if you're on one of the lower three rings - which are all available to anyone, with varying levels of Insider experience - you should be seeing this update pretty soon. Non-Insiders should get the feature update next month, after which Microsoft will likely begin rolling out previews for the big 1803 update.