efbX, the EFB platform from streamer and real-world A320 captain KatiePilot, knows exactly how its marketing is landing with simmers. When people first come across it, she admits, the overwhelming majority react with some version of “oh cool, another EFB.” You do not often catch a developer quoting the unimpressed take on their own product straight back at you. But it is the right place to begin, because how efbX looks in a screenshot and what it says it does is the reason it stood out at FSExpo this month.
efbX is not really trying to be a tablet. The developer is presenting it as a platform, something closer to an operating system, with a built-in app store where you install only the apps you want and ignore the rest. Some of those apps come from efbX. Others, in theory, come from outside developers. What you are left with is supposed to be personal, the way two pilots at the same airline rarely keep their real EFBs set up the same way.
The captain behind it
KatiePilot is the one making it. She flies commercially, says she has spent around six years working in flight sim, and lists past involvement on the Fenix A320 and the iniBuilds A310. Her reasoning is less “wouldn’t this be neat” and more a working pilot’s complaint. At her job, she says, you show up, brief, fuel, board, and go, because every tool you need is already laid out in front of you. At home, with a yoke and throttles on the desk, you are still squinting into a tiny tablet bolted to a virtual pedestal. efbX is her attempt to close that distance.
The plumbing is straightforward enough. It runs on your sim PC, and you reach it from wherever suits you: a desktop window, a real tablet, your phone, a spare laptop on the network. efbX says iOS, Android, and PC are all covered, and that it will run on its own even with no sim connected.
So what did people actually see at FSExpo? The demo went hard into ground operations, which is where the real-airline framing has to earn its keep. efbX ran GSX from inside the app, with the developer ordering fuel, coordinating services, and generating a digital fuel receipt once the truck finished, on top of the usual boarding, catering, and pushback controls.
There was SimBrief, flight plan import, checklists, and operational flight plans you can scribble on with drawing tools. Real-time flight tracking sat next to push notifications that can surface mid-flight, among them flight sim news sites.
efbX says there will be a free base tier, with no word yet on what a paid tier buys you. And charts, the feature many are wondering about, will be limited at the start because of licensing, though the developer says talks with a third party are underway to widen that later.
An EFB with an App Store
A store with empty shelves is just a room. efbX only becomes the thing it is selling once outside developers decide to build for it, and at this stage that is an intention rather than a roster of signed-up partners. The developer is clearly looking for more and invites the community to spread the word, on the logic that a bigger audience makes third parties keener to plug in. Fair enough.
The calendar asks for patience too. efbX is in alpha, beta will be invite-only with applications opening later, and Q4 2026 is not an exact date. If you want a working EFB on a real tablet this weekend, iFly Schedules shipped one back in May, and the native MSFS 2024 tablet is quite good too. efbX is playing a slower, riskier game that may pay off in a big way if that “platform” ambition comes to fruition.
Which loops back to the admission it started with. On a slide, it is another EFB, admittedly a pretty one. The wager is that the app store turns it into something a teaser video at this stage can hardly show, and the only people who can settle that wager are the developers efbX now has to win over. Early-access sign-ups are open on its site if you want a seat while it tries.
