Poll: ** The official Apple TV 4K thread (the 2021 model has a new remote and everything!) **

[Cromulent]

Yeah, I have just plugged the Fire TV back in and immediately you can see the difference in a number of apps - BBC iPlayer has UHD options, ITVX and Peloton apps have more features than Apple TV. It makes me sad as I much prefer the tvOS experience as a whole.

I got Sky Stream last month and I'm finding I'm streaming on that more now rather than switching to my Apple TV. The thing I really miss is easy AirPod switching on the Apple TV.

 

[HACO]

Are there any Apple Developers on this forum who could give some insight as to why tvOS is a bit neglected?

A couple of things that came up recently - BBC Sounds is not available on tvOS. Why is this when it works perfectly well on iOS? I thought all these operating systems were very similar to develop for? And no subtitles on BBC iPlayer on tvOS. What nonsense is this when they are perfect on iPhone?

I'm starting to think I should plug my Amazon Fire TV stick back in and just use Apple TV for Fitness+ and Screen Mirroring only. What a shame.

It's just a much smaller platform compared to Amazon, Android, Tyzen, WebOS, etc... Also much smaller platform than iPhones so it probably doesn't make sense for them to tie the iPhone's releases to tvOS, BBC would probably prefer to release quicker for iPhones and every couple of years bundle a new release together for tvOS.

And if you have Apple TV, you probably already have access to at least one of the above directly via your TV, so while inconvenient you're still a reachable customer.

 

[ic1male]

It's just a much smaller platform compared to Amazon, Android, Tyzen, WebOS, etc... Also much smaller platform than iPhones so it probably doesn't make sense for them to tie the iPhone's releases to tvOS, BBC would probably prefer to release quicker for iPhones and every couple of years bundle a new release together for tvOS.

And if you have Apple TV, you probably already have access to at least one of the above directly via your TV, so while inconvenient you're still a reachable customer.

I take that on board but I was under the impression that developing for one Apple device meant little to no alteration of the code to get things going on another device. (Obviously the GUI layouts are a different kettle of fish.)

Then I realised that none of these apps are probably written using XCode+Swift to enable quick parity. Probably some third party thing like Xamarin to enable feature parity across Android+iOS.