What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
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What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
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Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#2[deleted]
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#3As someone that used to work on a TV app I wasn't surprised when focus issues were the first thing mentioned. It sounds trivial but it takes a surprising amount of testing and bug fixing to get it right.
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#4I'd be curious why Amazon's Prime app has such horrible performance compared to literally every other streaming service, on WebOS at least (on a relatively recent LG OLED). They're all doing more or less the same thing, as far as I can tell as a user at least, yet just moving the focus around in Amazon's streaming app takes 0.5 second while it's instant in other apps. The bandwidth for actual streaming seems the same as the others, so videos start streaming much faster, but the UI is seemingly doing something very wrong, and I don't understand how they could have gotten it so wrong.
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#5I always found most tv apps have some performance issues. I've seen netflix, prime, even youtube crash, lag, or have some issues now and then that just made me think that maybe tvs are just not powerful. Don't even want to talk about Disney+, HBO, or Hulu.
Then I got an appletv+ subscription, and was pleasantly surprised it performed far better, on an android tv even. I wonder if it's beyond just the company standards for performance, and that the lower compatibility for porting between swift and the android sdks compared to idk react components or flutter, forced them to start from scratch for performance on android tvs.
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#6The "low powered hardware" is why I always buy an external streaming device. I started with the original Apple TV, then a bunch of Roku variants, when Roku got unreliable, I went back to modern Apple TVs. They just work better. I've had sales guys in stores get really pushy with me about "you dont need that", one time I finally had to say to one of them "I get it, I don't care that its already in the TV, I'm buying the external box, either from you or from another store so stop arguing and just sell it to me".
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#7I'd be curious why Amazon's Prime app has such horrible performance compared to literally every other streaming service, on WebOS at least (on a relatively recent LG OLED). They're all doing more or less the same thing, as far as I can tell as a user at least, yet just moving the focus around in Amazon's streaming app takes 0.5 second while it's instant in other apps. The bandwidth for actual streaming seems the same…
I would assume they hire competent engineers, so it’s probably something intentional, like an invasion of privacy/user telemetry. At least it doesn’t have AWS’s UX.
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#8The "low powered hardware" is why I always buy an external streaming device. I started with the original Apple TV, then a bunch of Roku variants, when Roku got unreliable, I went back to modern Apple TVs. They just work better. I've had sales guys in stores get really pushy with me about "you dont need that", one time I finally had to say to one of them "I get it, I don't care that its already in the TV, I'm buying t…
Absolutely. I do the same. IMO it's either Apple TV or Nvidia Shield. Everything else is hit or miss (likely miss).
From a developer's perspective, it's a nightmare to deal with such hardware.
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#9I'd be curious why Amazon's Prime app has such horrible performance compared to literally every other streaming service, on WebOS at least (on a relatively recent LG OLED). They're all doing more or less the same thing, as far as I can tell as a user at least, yet just moving the focus around in Amazon's streaming app takes 0.5 second while it's instant in other apps. The bandwidth for actual streaming seems the same…
I've noticed this as well. My best guess is either low hardware or just a bad solution.
If they planned to use a unified codebase for Prime app, they likely went with something HTML/CSS-based, which would explain the performance issues. I could be wrong, but it's just a hunch I have.
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#10As someone that used to work on a TV app I wasn't surprised when focus issues were the first thing mentioned. It sounds trivial but it takes a surprising amount of testing and bug fixing to get it right.
I remember one time there was a random Philips TV that just kept crashing when the user tried to do "right" on the last item in a horizontal menu. The client kept testing on this TV, and we spent 3 weeks because my team lead at the time wouldn't trust me that I needed the TV to solve it.
They finally agreed to send us the TV. Solved the issue in 10mins.