SimFly Pad A380 Premium Panel: the jet is free and so is the panel it competes with

The marketing image SeeingSky uses to sell this product spells it "SimFly Pad A380 Preimum Panel". It has been sitting on the simMarket listing since the product went on sale on 13 March 2025, and seventeen months later nobody has fixed it. That is a small thing, but it is a fair indicator of how much attention this corner of the catalogue gets.

Because almost nobody has written about the SimFly Pad A380 Premium Panel. One simMarket review, five stars, posted 29 April 2025. One announcement thread on the official MSFS forums, dated 15 November 2024, with zero replies. Two YouTube videos, both made by the developer himself, the more watched of which has 727 views on a channel with 138 subscribers. SeeingSky's own official support forum on AVSIM has not had a new topic posted to it since 3 November 2024 — and the A380 panel, announced twelve days after that, was never mentioned there at all.

The second thing to establish is the one that matters most for a product that plugs into another product: what does the whole stack cost? The good news is unambiguous. €22.99, and nothing else. The aeroplane this panel drives is FlyByWire's A380X, which has been free since 31 October 2024 and, being FlyByWire, always will be. There is no seventy-euro host aircraft hiding behind this purchase, no subscription, and the SimFly Pad app and its SimFly Linker PC bridge are both free downloads. For once the sticker price is the real price.

The third thing is the catch, and it comes from SeeingSky themselves. On the developer's own compatibility page, a little below the premium A380 entry, sits a free panel called A380 Lite, described in their words as a "free lightweight panel for the FlyByWire A380". Same aeroplane. Same app. Same developer. No charge. And nowhere — not in the store listing, not in the documentation, not in the marketing — does anyone say what the €22.99 version gives you that the free one does not. The entire commercial case for this product rests on a difference that has never been written down in public.

That tension is what this review is about. We read 24 sources: both store listings, the developer's site and documentation, three MSFS forum threads, two AVSIM threads, a PMDG forum thread, the Apple and Google app-store pages including their user reviews, the developer's own videos, and the coverage of the host aircraft that determines whether any of this keeps working. Reddit, which would normally give a fast read of sentiment, is not reachable from where we work, and on a product this quiet its absence is felt more than usual.

What you are actually buying

An advanced panel profile inside a free mobile app. You run SimFly Linker on the sim PC, open SimFly Pad on a phone, tablet or second Windows machine over your wireless LAN, and the app becomes a remote overhead, centre pedestal and FCU for the aircraft, with the cockpit displays streamed across to it.

Component	Cost	Notes
SimFly Pad A380 Premium Panel	€22.99 (simMarket, PID 19909)	Activation code bound to a SimFly Pad account, not to a device
SimFly Pad app	Free	iOS 16+, Android 9+, or Windows 10 22H2 / Windows 11
SimFly Linker (PC bridge)	Free, included	Required for everything except the checklists
FlyByWire A380X	Free	The only supported aircraft
Microsoft Flight Simulator	2020 or 2024	Both, whatever the store badge says

We verified the price on 20 August 2026: €22.99, shown alongside reference conversions of USD 26.68 and GBP 19.68. There is no cheaper first-party channel — SeeingSky does not run its own shop, and points buyers at simMarket. Buying the panel as an Apple in-app purchase instead costs $24.99. Do not read the €22.99 and the $24.99 as a like-for-like comparison: simMarket's terms state that displayed prices "include the respectively applicable value added tax", which for a browser session with no country resolved means the figure carries 0% VAT and will move once you log in and it knows where you live. We are not going to tell you which store is cheaper, because on the evidence available nobody can.

The bit the store does not tell you

Two facts are missing from the listing, and both change the decision.

The first is the free A380 Lite panel described above. The second is the SimFly Pad Lifetime Pass, documented on SeeingSky's own site but mentioned nowhere on the product page: own any five of the thirteen premium panels and you can claim, at no extra cost, every premium panel SeeingSky currently sells and every one they release in future. The claim window closes on 31 December 2026. Five panels is €114.95, and the thirteenth is included. If you already own four SimFly Pad panels, this one is effectively the key to the other eight, and the value maths inverts completely. If you own none, it is a €22.99 gamble on a paywalled upgrade to something you can already have for free.

One aeroplane, and it is not the one many people own

The listing says "Supports FBW A380", and that is the complete list. Not "A380 aircraft" — one specific freeware A380X from FlyByWire. Anyone who bought a Premium or Aviator edition of MSFS 2024 owns the iniBuilds A380 that ships with it, and this panel does nothing for that aircraft. SeeingSky do support iniBuilds elsewhere in the range — the A330, A340 and A350 panels are all built for iniBuilds aircraft — so this is a gap in coverage rather than a policy. But a product called "A380 Premium Panel" sold to a 2024 audience is going to be misread by someone, and that someone will have paid €22.99 for it.

What the community consistently praises

An honest caveat before the praise: the positive column here is thin and, in places, self-authored. Two of the enthusiastic sources are the developer's own videos, and several more are marketing pages. Strip those out and what remains is a small number of owners who like it, plus a broad consensus about the app underneath it.

It does not cost you frames. This is the single most consistent finding across the record, and it goes back further than the A380 panel does. A PMDG forum user writing on 16 January 2024 about the wider app put it plainly: "I do not find any reduction in FPS". SeeingSky's design reason is credible — the panel runs on a separate device over the LAN, so the sim is only pushing variable state and streamed windows, not rendering another instrument view. For an aeroplane as heavy as the A380X, on which one MSFS forum poster reported hitting the resource warning in VR even at reduced textures on 26 November 2025, an off-loaded panel that costs nothing in performance is a genuinely attractive proposition.

Latency is low enough to fly with. SeeingSky claim around 10ms typical and under 20ms worst case. The one detailed owner report we have, from Raphael on simMarket on 29 April 2025, describes running the sim on a ROG Ally handheld with the phone connected through Samsung Flow, which is about as awkward a configuration as anyone is likely to attempt, and calls the result "Perfect". A Google Play reviewer on 13 March 2025 was more measured and more useful: it works, and "it can be laggy if you don't have the best internet (obviously)". Both are true. This is a wireless LAN product and it inherits your network's problems.

The developer answers. The same PMDG poster described SeeingSky as "very responsive", and the developer's history on AVSIM through 2023 and 2024 shows a steady cadence of release notes and troubleshooting guides posted personally. Contact details — email, Discord, YouTube — are printed on the store page rather than hidden behind a ticket system.

SeeingSky publish their own failures. The premium-panel known-issues page names exactly which controls do not work on each panel, by aircraft, without softening. For the A380 that is: all overhead guard covers, Cabin Alt/VS, Ann Light Test, ATCMSG/AUTOLAND, and side stick priority. Publishing a list like that costs sales and it is uncommon. Credit where it is due.

The app is still being worked on. Version 4.7.8 shipped on 24 July 2026, adding an MSFS 2024 in-game EFB panel available on all aircraft, streaming diagnostics for jitter and packet loss, and fixes for several crashes. Whatever else is true here, this is not abandonware.

What keeps coming up as a problem

Nobody will tell you what you are paying for. Still open. This is the central complaint and it is structural. The developer sells a €22.99 A380 panel and gives away an A380 Lite panel for the same aircraft, and no document anywhere states the difference. Reading between the marketing lines, the premium panel adds the full overhead, centre panel and FCU with bidirectional sync, streaming of five displays at once including EFB and SD, and touch control on the MFD — but that is inference from the feature list, not a comparison anyone has published. Try the free Lite panel first. That is not a hedge; it is the only sensible order of operations, and the fact that we have to say it is the developer's fault.

Screen streaming requires MSFS pop-out windows, and the tax compounds. Still open. The store page discloses this in a parenthesis: "(Requires pop-out windows in the game)". Pop-outs in MSFS are fiddly to place and they cost frames. SeeingSky's own known-issues page then concedes that "if the game FPS is low (below 20), the touchscreen operated through SimFly Pad may become unresponsive to taps". Those two facts point at each other. The feature that costs you frames disables itself when frames get low, and the A380X is one of the heaviest aircraft in the simulator.

A focus-stealing bug on the MFD. Still open. From the same page, verbatim: opening the MFD's popup keyboard and then touching the MFD's touchscreen puts MSFS into a "lost focus" state where the sim stops responding to your peripherals until you close the virtual keyboard. It is recoverable and documented. It is also exactly the sort of thing that happens on a hurried approach.

The official support forum is dead. Still open. SeeingSky's AVSIM support forum, forum 913, was active with release notes roughly fortnightly through 2024 and then stopped. The last topic is the version 4.0.0 release notes of 3 November 2024, which has no replies. The A380 panel arrived after that and was never posted there. The known-issues documentation that owners are directed to from the store page was itself last updated around September 2025. Development plainly continues — the app updates say so — but the public support surface has gone quiet, and for a product with this little community around it, that is where you would be going for help.

The Android store record is poor, and recent. Still open. SimFly Pad on Google Play sits at 2.9 from 34 reviews, with the phone-and-tablet subset at 2.7 from 27, against 10,000-plus downloads. The most recent visible review, from 13 July 2026, is the one that stings: a "good concept app, but misleading", with "very expensive addon purchases", and "virtually useless except for GA aircraft" without them. That is a customer describing precisely the free-to-premium gap this product sits in. Apple's storefront is much kinder at 4.7 from 15 ratings, which is a small sample and a different, more curated audience — but the disagreement between the two is real and we are not going to resolve it away.

An account and cloud-storage failure. Isolated but serious. On 5 April 2026 a Play Store reviewer reported that video downloads stopped working, that reinstalling left them unable to log in, and that a password reset email never arrived — losing their recordings. One report is not a finding by our rules, and the panel activation being bound to a SimFly Pad account rather than a device is normally a convenience. It is worth knowing that the account system is what stands between you and the thing you bought.

Performance and stability

The performance story is genuinely good, for the architectural reason given above, and it is the strongest single argument for the product. The stability question is different, and it is the one we cannot answer.

This is an add-on that hooks another add-on, and the host has moved twice in the last nine months. FlyByWire's A380X reached MSFS 2024 compatibility with the v0.14.0 stable release on 3 December 2025, which was a compatibility pass rather than a rebuild. Then on 27 June 2026 FlyByWire released a native MSFS 2024 A380X, built from the ground up on the 2024 SDK — a separate package, not an update, with a new modular component system, a no-cabin variant, VRAM savings of one to two gigabytes and up to 50% better frame rates on lower-spec machines. That rebuild broke existing liveries outright until they were repackaged.

A ground-up rebuild that breaks liveries is precisely the event that breaks a third-party panel hooking the aircraft's variables. And here is what the public record says about whether it did: nothing. Not one report either way. SeeingSky's compatibility page, which is current, still lists the A380 panel as covering MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024 against the FBW A380, and carries no caveat — and they do write such caveats elsewhere, noting for instance that the A330 panel's iniBuilds support is "MSFS 2024 only". So the developer is claiming coverage. But the known-issues page has not been touched since roughly September 2025, well before the rebuild, and there is no changelog, no forum thread, and no owner saying "it still works" or "it stopped working". We score this on the risk, not on a documented breakage, and buyers should understand that is what they are taking on.

On the store badge

simMarket tags this product MFS20 and nothing else, and the briefing that sent us here repeated it. It is wrong. The Requirements block on that same simMarket page reads "MSFS2020/MSFS2024". SeeingSky's own compatibility page lists the A380 panel under "MSFS 2020, MSFS 2024". The July 2026 app release notes add an MSFS 2024 in-game EFB panel. The host aircraft has been 2024-capable since December 2025 and native since June 2026. And on SeeingSky's own vendor page at simMarket, the B737 panel is titled "MSFS/FS24" while carrying the MFS20 badge alone — so the badges are demonstrably unreliable for this vendor. If you fly MSFS 2024, this product is for you. The badge is stale.

Who should buy it

If you already own four SimFly Pad premium panels, buy this one now. It is the fifth, it triggers the Lifetime Pass, and the Pass gives you the remaining eight plus everything SeeingSky releases afterwards, for nothing. The claim window shuts on 31 December 2026. At that point you are not paying €22.99 for an A380 panel, you are paying €22.99 for eight more panels, and the question stops being interesting.

If you fly the FlyByWire A380X often on a two-screen or tablet setup, try the free A380 Lite first, then buy this if it falls short. You will lose nothing but an evening, and you will learn the one thing the developer refuses to document. If the Lite panel already covers the switches you reach for, keep your money.

If you fly the A380X occasionally and have a spare tablet, it is a reasonable €22.99. No frame cost, low latency, an overhead you can hit with a finger instead of hunting with a mouse. Go in knowing the guard covers and a handful of annunciator functions do not work, and that pop-out windows are the price of the streamed displays.

If your A380 is the iniBuilds one bundled with MSFS 2024 Premium, do not buy this. It does nothing for you. There is no A380 panel in the SimFly Pad range that supports it, and the product name will not warn you.

If you want a documented, supported product with an active community behind it, do not buy this. Not because it is bad, but because the record is nearly empty: one store review, no independent video, no written review anywhere, and a support forum that stopped in November 2024. If you need to be able to search for your problem before you hit it, this is not the add-on for you.

Where it stands today

Judged as a piece of software, the SimFly Pad A380 Premium Panel appears to be competent. The single detailed owner report is unqualified praise, the app underneath it is updated monthly, the developer publishes an unflattering list of what does not work, and the architecture avoids the frame-rate cost that similar tools incur. There is no evidence at all that it is bad.

Judged as a purchase, in August 2026, it is harder to recommend than that sounds. The price is honest and the entry cost is genuinely just €22.99, which is more than can be said for most add-ons that layer onto other add-ons. But the developer is competing with himself and losing the argument on disclosure: a free A380 Lite panel exists for the same aircraft, and until somebody writes down the difference, every buyer is paying for an unspecified delta. Add a host aircraft that was rebuilt from scratch eight weeks ago with nobody publicly confirming the panel survived it, a dormant support forum, and a 2.9 Android rating whose most recent reviewer complains about exactly this paywall, and the sensible move is to install the free version this evening and decide for yourself.

The Lifetime Pass is the thing that could change all of this, and it is the strangest omission of the lot. SeeingSky have built a genuine reason to buy their fifth panel and buried it in a documentation subfolder while the store page says nothing. If you are five panels deep into this ecosystem before 31 December 2026, this review's arithmetic no longer applies to you and you should go and read that page. Everyone else should start with the free one.