This guide is for people coming from the previous version of Playlab. It will be retired in August 2026 once everyone has migrated. For current Playlab guidance, see Learn on Your Own or Feature Documentation.
What pushed the change
Earlier, Playlab worked well for individual builders and small teams. As partners scaled to dozens of organizations and thousands of students, three patterns showed strain. Workspaces were doing too many jobs. Membership, sharing, ownership, and activity were all scoped to the workspace. Adding a peer to your workspace gave them edit access to every app in it. Sharing one app meant remixing it. Activity rolled up to the wrong place. The workspace became a bottleneck. Remixing made deployment fragile. A partner who curated a set of apps for ten partner districts had to remix each app into each district’s workspace. Updates required re-remixing. In practice, copies drifted within weeks. The pattern broke at any scale beyond a single classroom. Admins had no central place to see flags or activity. A trust-and-safety incident in any workspace required walking every workspace to find the conversation. Cross-workspace patterns were invisible. The most-asked admin question, what has this student been doing, didn’t have a direct answer. Playlab now splits those jobs into purpose-built containers and adds a sharing surface that works across organizations.What actually changed
Five capabilities are new. Each links to its own guide.Share apps with Collections
Curate your favorite apps into a Collection and share it across a whole organization. Build the set once, share it with as many people as you like, and every recipient gets all the apps — plus any updates you publish.
One app, many workspaces
Add the same app to as many workspaces as you need — one per class, say. Each workspace collects its own segmented activity, and a single update reaches every version at once.
Control who can use and build
New apps start private to you and your org’s admins. Add editors and viewers to a single app or a whole workspace, and change or revoke access at any time.
Organize apps like a drive
Creating and organizing apps now feels like your Google Drive. Make an app from the org or workspace level, share edit or usage access right from the app, and move apps without remixing.
Analytics at every level — coming soon
Coming later this summer: insights from app to workspace to organization. Builders track their own app, teachers see their class, and admins see across the whole org.
What stays the same
The app builder, prompts, references, model selection, conversation flow, and voice and dictation all carry over. Existing apps keep their owners and members. Activity history is retained. URLs you embedded in class materials redirect to the current paths. Most of what your students do day-to-day is unchanged.Where to next
I'm new to Playlab
Start with sign-up, then orient through Getting Started.
See what's new
See what changed and what you can do now that you couldn’t before.
FAQ
Is this just a rename?
Is this just a rename?
No. Playlab reorganizes how content lives and travels. The building experience inside an app is the same. Sharing, deploying, and monitoring are different.
Will the previous version keep working?
Will the previous version keep working?
The previous version keeps working through the migration period. Specific sunset dates are announced by the Playlab team.
How was this designed?
How was this designed?
These updates grew out of a year of research with the people who use Playlab every day — a diverse set of partner organizations, educators, and builders across our community. We paid attention to how teachers, students, and builders were actually working, listened for where Playlab got in their way, and turned what we heard into the updates you see now.
Last updated: 06-01-2026 Contact us at [email protected]