MSFS Bridge FS2024: five euros for the easy path, when the free path does more

On 16 December 2024 a man called Rusty Spanner logged into AVSIM, read a thread from a simmer whose tablet had stopped talking to Microsoft Flight Simulator, and helpfully suggested MSFS Bridge — five euros, works with SkyDemon, might be worth a look. Three posts earlier the simmer had already found a free fork of an open-source tool that did the same job and drew traffic on the map as well. Rusty apologised the next morning for posting before his second coffee.

That exchange is the whole review in miniature. MSFS Bridge is a 253-kilobyte program that reads your simulated aeroplane's position out of the simulator and shouts it across your home network on UDP port 49002, in the format X-Plane uses, so that SkyDemon or ForeFlight on a tablet in your lap thinks it is receiving a GPS. It is the cheapest thing in our review queue. Everyone who buys it says it is trivial to set up. And in nearly every technical thread where somebody asks how to do this, the answer that gets upvoted is free.

There is a second number that matters more than the five euros. SkyDemon costs USD 139 for the first year and USD 115 to renew. ForeFlight starts at USD 130 a year and the tier with synthetic vision is USD 260. This add-on is worth precisely nothing to you unless you already pay one of those bills, which means the real question is not whether five euros is a fair price — it obviously is — but whether the tool you bolt onto a hundred-and-something-dollar subscription should be the paid one or one of the six free ones.

The record is thinner than we would like. There is no video review of this product anywhere on YouTube, no written coverage from any of the sim news sites, no developer forum, no changelog and no working developer website. What there is: 25 verified customer reviews across the two SKUs going back to August 2020, several long forum threads in which the product is recommended and then argued about, and a technical record of what its competitors do that it does not. We read 23 sources for this review. Reddit, which is where sentiment on a five-euro utility would normally be easiest to read, is unreachable from where we work, so treat the absence of it as a gap in method rather than evidence that nobody talks about this.

What you are actually buying

Two separate products, both five euros, both sold only at simMarket. There is no upgrade path between them.

	MSFS Bridge (original)	MSFS Bridge FS2024
simMarket PID	13694	20584
On sale since	28 August 2020	22 October 2025
Latest build	1.0.3 (reported by a buyer, June 2025)	1.0.0
Store platform badge	MFS20	MFS20 + MFS24
Stated requirement	MSFS 2020 on the same PC	MSFS 2024 on the same PC
Price	€ 5.00	€ 5.00
Download size	56.62 KB	252.94 KB
Store rating	4.35 from 23 reviews	5.0 from 2 reviews

Note the third and fourth rows against each other. simMarket badges the FS2024 listing for both MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024, and the price-comparison site FS Addon Compare copies that badge across. The listing's own requirements section says "Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 installed on the same PC", and the description tells anyone upgrading from "a previous version of MSFS Bridge (1.x for MSFS 2020)" to delete the old one first. Those are not the same statement. If you fly only MSFS 2020, the store badge says the new product covers you and the product page does not confirm it. Buy the older SKU, which is still listed and still costs the same.

If you already own the 2020 version, you are buying it again. There is no discount, no upgrade voucher and no note on either page acknowledging that the same customers are being asked twice. At five euros this is a small grievance rather than a large one, but it is the sort of thing the record should say out loud.

What is in the box is one small executable with a tray icon and a text file for the target IP address. It sends position, groundspeed, track and altitude. It does not send attitude, it does not send traffic, it does not import a flight plan and it does not touch weather. The requirements are Windows 10 64-bit or later, the simulator on the same PC, your tablet on the same network, and UDP port 49002 open through the firewall.

The bit the marketing does not price

You also need SkyDemon, ForeFlight, Garmin Pilot or FltPlan Go, and for the first two that is a recurring subscription. SkyDemon is USD 139 in year one and USD 115 thereafter. ForeFlight Starter is USD 130 a year, Essential USD 260, Premium USD 390. FltPlan Go is free, and Garmin Pilot has a low-cost tier, so the cheap route exists — but the two apps in this product's title are the expensive ones. Anyone reading "five euros" as the cost of getting a moving-map EFB into their sim is reading it wrong by a factor of about twenty-five.

What the community consistently praises

It installs and connects faster than anything else in this category. This is the one finding that never varies across six years. Kenneth, 11 December 2020: "Installed, up and running in less than 5 mins." Biggbest on the SkyDemon forum, 29 August 2020: "no more than 2 minutes to connect." Jake, 10 September 2024: "How refreshing to have something that just works. No hassle, no messing about." Grant, 23 July 2026, on the FS2024 build: setup is "super easy". Fourteen of the 23 reviews on the original listing are five stars, and almost all of them are some variation of that sentence. In a hobby where the standard experience of a network utility is an evening of firewall rules, this genuinely matters and it is what people are paying for.

It does not cost frames. In six years of public discussion nobody has reported a performance hit. That is not faint praise for something reading SimConnect at flight-loop rates; the developer's claim of "zero impact on frame rate" is the one marketing line the record confirms without qualification.

It is genuinely useful for real pilots, which is a narrower and better claim than it sounds. The most substantial customer review on the listing, from Hassan on 31 October 2025, is from a student pilot who uses it to learn SkyDemon's NOTAM overlays, frequency lookups and airspace depiction on the ground so the app is not new to him in the air. Jake makes the same point about qualifying cross-countries and hour-building to unfamiliar airfields. This is not sim eye-candy. It is a cheap way to build muscle memory on software you will be operating single-pilot at 2,000 feet, and several buyers say so independently.

Early support was quick and free. MSFS Bridge launched on 28 August 2020, nine days after MSFS 2020 itself. By 13 September a customer on the official forums reported "a free update that connects to Garmin Pilot and Fltplan Go", widening the product from two EFB apps to four inside a fortnight, at no charge.

What keeps coming up as a problem

It stopped updating position in October 2025 — status: unresolved on the 2020 SKU, superseded on the 2024 one. Two customers, on the same day, 15 October 2025, reported the same failure independently. Harry: "broken for MSFS2020 as of Oct 2025. Only the initial position is sent to SkyDemon, no updates." Cornelius, on MSFS 2024: SkyDemon on the iPad "shows only the initial position on the departure airfield" and then nothing for the rest of the flight. Seven days later, on 22 October 2025, the FS2024 product appeared on simMarket as a separate five-euro purchase. We cannot show that one caused the other — a rebuild in a week is quick — but that is the sequence the public record contains, and the older listing has had no patch, no statement and no acknowledgement since. Customers who reported a break were answered with a new SKU.

No attitude data, five years after it was asked for — status: still open. Robert, 19 March 2021, on ForeFlight: the tool "appears to not be sending attitude" and so ForeFlight's synthetic vision cannot draw the horizon. He raised it again on 3 April and 15 April 2021, reporting that the developer had said pitch and roll would "probably" arrive in a future update with no timeline. The FS2024 release notes of October 2025 list four improvements and attitude is not among them. This costs ForeFlight subscribers on the USD 260 Essential tier a headline feature they are paying for; it costs the free alternatives nothing, because most of them send XATT attitude packets as standard.

No traffic — status: by design, and increasingly the deciding factor. The tool sends ownship only. On AVSIM in December 2024 the poster who had been offered MSFS Bridge explained why he was not taking it: he wanted something "lightweight, free and broadcasting AI and others MSFS Trafic", and the free fork of fs2ff gave him all three. Traffic is the single most common reason people in these threads choose a rival.

Intermittent dropouts on iOS — status: unresolved, cause disputed. Marco, 8 December 2023, writing in German, gave it three stars: the connection to his iPad held for about three seconds and then died, and firewall changes, router-level network settings and disabling his antivirus made no difference. This one is not cleanly the developer's fault — on the SkyDemon forum in August 2020, users of the rival XMapsy described exactly the same behaviour on mobile SkyDemon while the Windows desktop version ran flawlessly, and concluded the fault was in SkyDemon's mobile app. Two independent tools failing the same way on the same platform points away from this developer. It still means an iPad user should expect to troubleshoot.

No support channel worth the name — status: still open. The vendor page lists an email address, info@filyit.com. The matching domain, filyit.com, has been registered since 2004 and currently returns 404. There is no developer website, no forum, no Discord, no changelog and no public bug tracker. Robert's April 2021 note that he had "notified the developer but have not heard back" is the only documented support interaction in the record, and it went unanswered.

Performance and stability

The stability question for a tool like this is not whether it crashes. It is whether it survives the host. MSFS Bridge reads the simulator through SimConnect, and SimConnect is exactly where sim updates do their damage.

The dated record: on 26 November 2024, a week after MSFS 2024 launched, Cornelius reported the 2020-era build working on both simulators with SkyDemon on Android. On 12 June 2025, under MSFS 2024's Sim Update 2, Cosmo flew an hour of VFR from Redhill to the QE2 bridge and back with SkyDemon on an Android tablet and it held — but he noted the tray icon still read version 1.0.3 and still announced itself as "connected to FS2020 and broadcasting to all network" while he was flying MSFS 2024, found the position noticeably laggier than under MSFS 2020, and finished with the sentence that best characterises this product's relationship with its host: "At the moment, it's just luck that kept this working." Four months later it stopped.

This is not a peculiarity of one developer. In the same period, fs2ff — the leading free option — broke against MSFS 2024 patch 1.2.7 in December 2024 and needed a community fork to fix it. The developer of the newest alternative, FS2EFB, explained the mechanism on the official forums on 29 March 2026: SimConnect is flexible but "sometimes it act unpredictable", with requests throttled and "some things stops to work after sim updates". Every tool in this category is one Asobo build away from silence. The difference is that the free ones have a public repository where you can see whether anybody is still fixing them, and this one has a version number that has not moved since the day it launched.

On the specific question of frame rate, the marketing claim holds. Nothing in 25 customer reviews or six years of threads reports a performance cost.

Who should buy it

The real-world pilot who already pays for SkyDemon and wants to practise, not tinker. Buy it. This is the profile the product was built for and the one the five-star reviews come from. You have already spent USD 139 on the app; five euros to get your sim feeding it, with a setup that half a dozen strangers independently describe as taking under five minutes, is a rounding error and a fair trade for an evening you do not spend reading GitHub issues.

The MSFS 2024 simmer who wants traffic on the tablet. Do not buy it. It does not send traffic and never has. Take the jeffdamp-wave fork of fs2ff, which is free, open, was updated on 10 December 2025 and puts AI aircraft on your EFB alongside your own.

The ForeFlight subscriber on Essential or Premium. Do not buy it, or buy it knowing exactly what you are giving up. Synthetic vision needs pitch and roll, this tool has not sent them since 2021 and has been asked to three times in public. EFBConnect and the free forks send attitude.

The MSFS 2020-only simmer. Buy the original SKU, not the FS2024 one, whatever the store badge says — and understand that the 2020 build's October 2025 position-update failure has never been publicly fixed. If you are affected, you will be buying the newer product to get out of it.

The tinkerer, the Xbox player, and anyone who wants weather and flight plans moving in both directions. Not this. Look at FS2EFB, released 26 March 2026, which handles position, attitude, traffic in three protocols, weather import and flight-plan import, and runs on console.

Where it stands today

As of August 2026, MSFS Bridge FS2024 has been on sale for ten months at version 1.0.0 and has collected two customer reviews, both five stars, the most recent on 23 July 2026 confirming it works with SkyDemon on Android under MSFS 2024. That is a real data point and it is the only one. Ten months without a build number changing is not automatically neglect for a tool this small — there may have been nothing to fix — but the previous SKU also sat still for long stretches and then failed quietly, and there is no channel through which a buyer would learn either way.

The competitive position has moved against it, and not because it got worse. In 2020 the choice was this at five euros or XMapsy at fifteen, and MSFS Bridge won on price and simplicity; the SkyDemon forum thread from that August shows users doing exactly that arithmetic in public. In 2026 the choice includes a maintained free fork of fs2ff with traffic, a free MIT-licensed SkyDemon feeder written for MSFS 2024, EFBConnect with attitude, and FS2EFB doing all of it across PC and console. The paid tool is now the least capable option in its own category, and its remaining advantage is that it asks nothing of you.

Whether that advantage is worth five euros depends entirely on how you value an hour. If your answer is "more than five euros", this is a rational purchase and the reviews will not have misled you. If your answer is "I would rather read a README", the money stays in your pocket and you get more for it.