Hands on with the Apple TV app redesign in tvOS 17.2
Wesley HilliardApple TV app redesign
The tvOS 17.2 beta included a redesigned Apple TV app emphasizing Channels and app navigation. Here's what changed.
The Apple TV hardware runs the Apple TV app, where the Apple TV+ service lives as a Channel. Until now, the Apple TV app was a mishmash of every piece of content available with minimal sorting options.
With tvOS 17.2, users get an all-new Apple TV app design. The primary Apple TV app experience remains mostly unchanged, but the top menu and navigation are much better thought out.
First, the top tab switcher has moved to a sidebar with many more options. The sidebar emphasizes available content sorted by Channels, but Apple TV, MLS, and iTunes content get the top spots.
And no, there isn't any way to remove the MLS Season Pass or Sports Channels. Apple will let you hide unwanted channels or apps but not any of its apps or services. (Coming to an antitrust case near you)
Watch Now is still a collection of any content enabled to populate the Apple TV app. The old circle icon Channels section is now "My TV" with square icons, which also merged with the apps section.
Select a Channel or app from My TV or the sidebar to jump to a dedicated page containing content just from that service. Channels have always had dedicated Up Next queues, but now so do apps.
There were so few premium Channels built into the Apple TV app that users likely never interacted with them outside of Paramount+. Now, apps like Disney+ and Max feel like they are part of the TV app in a way they never did before.
Netflix still isn't part of the Apple TV app or Up Next, and playing a video belonging to an app still launches the dedicated app to play it. However, the improved navigation of the sidebar and My TV sections makes everything much easier to navigate.
As long as you're inside a dedicated Channel or app section, all the content presented is part of that service, with few exceptions. Apps like Amazon Prime will still fool you into believing a piece of content is available within the Amazon Prime app but then ask for a digital purchase.
The Library tab contains everything purchased from iTunes. The sorting between movies, TV, 4K titles, and genres is still available, but there's a new set of glyphs depicting each genre.
The iTunes Store is still part of the Apple TV app but has combined the movie and TV sections. This streamlined experience is expected to replace the dedicated Movies and TV Shows apps on Apple TV, but they are still in tvOS 17.2.
The combined storefront still needs some work. It's mostly the movies view from before, but a few TV series options are intermixed.
The updated Apple TV app interface might take some getting used to, but we expect it will be a big win for ease of use. It also acts as an excellent showcase for Apple to convince more apps to join Apple TV Channels so users don't need to launch a separate app.
While the Apple TV app isn't perfect, the latest redesign is a step in the right direction. We're not sure Apple will ever convince companies like Disney to join Channels, so this is the next best thing — treating Channels and apps like equal services within the TV app.
Mike Wuerthele
Malcolm Owen
Chip Loder
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
Michael Stroup
16 Comments
I like it.
So the list on the left is the individual services (except the first one which shows all), and selecting any of them will shows the shows that service offers without the need to open the Apps anymore. Consistent. Streamlined.
Not having Netflix to support is a bit of ann inconvenience, and I would hate the store mixing up movies and tv shows.
That is an annoyance in prime for example. It is good that purchases are still a seperate menu to ATV+, that is real bad in prime.
how would it look as an app on smart tvs I wonder? You would not have the other streaming services in the side bar I suppose.
Shame you can't sort movies etc by criteria and being able to resize the icons would help with big libraries
I've got over 250 films and it a real hassle having to scroll through them all
Better than it was, I guess. But they should have put Apple TV+ and Season Pass in top spots of the Channels section, instead of its own section above Channels. The current app is incredibly frustrating since, in the UK, not all shows included in Up Next are also available as Chanels within the Apple TV app. For example, NOW and BBC iPlayer shows are in Up Next, but you have to exit the Apple TV app and go to the separate apps in the home page to access the channels.
Ultimately, the App is only as good as the Channels it shows. In the UK, it would have to offer BBC, ITV, Channel 4, NOW, SKY, etc as Chanels in the app, otherwise it is useless.
The mixing of bundled Amazon Prime content and paid content in Amazon Prime is especially annoying when a movie sequel is part of the Prime bundle but the original is paid content that you have not previously watched. If you’re like me, you’ll see a sequel that looks pretty good but you don’t want to watch it before you see the original, but then you find out you have to pay extra to start the series viewing from the start. Hopefully this is uncommon but it happened to me last night.
I’ve enjoyed the Apple TV app being a higher level indexing service since its inception. Whenever I get tired of digging through too many layers of menu hierarchy in what seems like an infinite loop I’ll summon Siri and sometimes that is the solution. But it’s too incomplete and comes down to how many streaming services are integrated with the TV app indexing and search capabilities. The more the better. Having the ability to globally search based on more general criteria like genre across all services would be great, as would the ability to specify additional search criteria, for example, “show me the Academy Award nominated movies from 2019,” or “show me all of the bass fishing videos from the past 30 years” would be awesome.
Anything that can minimize the amount of time I spend scrolling and navigating around an Apple TV with an Apple TV remote (of any generation) is a big quality of life improvement. Siri definitely helps, but it could be much better if more streaming services played along better with Apple’s services.