> Focus would get lost
An engineer from Netflix wrote a blog post in 2017 explaining how they handle LRUD input and focus: https://netflixtechblog.com/pass-the-remote-user-input-on-tv...
What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
11–20 of 49 posts
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#12I 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 standard…
My 2 cents: if you are big enough and the competition isn't as strong, users will give you a pass on some performance issues as long as they get the content they want.
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#13I'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.
> My best guess is either low hardware
If there was other apps we use that had the same issue, I'd chalk it up to hardware too, but maybe they simply don't test it on representative hardware? That might explain it.
> they likely went with something HTML/CSS-based, which would explain the performance issues
Not sure, the web browser in the TV seems to handle things just fine, and much faster than Amazon's app, so I don't think HTML/CSS is to blame here. Probably shit architecture/software design, as usual.
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#14I'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.
> like an invasion of privacy/user telemetry
Could be. Interesting anecdote on that, we're using the Vodafone TV app on the very same TV, and that app you can toggle "send analytics to Vodafone" on or off in the settings, which of course defaults to on.
At one point I toggled it to off, and suddenly the whole app became as fast as all the others, while when the toggle is on, the application is as slow and laggy as the Amazon one. So that might actually very well be the reason.
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#15I'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…
One other thing that the Amazon Prime app does on LG TVs(and I apologize if you haven't noticed this earlier) - if you are using optical audio output, there's a horrible delay between audio and video, which doesn't really exist in any other app. It's been reported for years, and Amazon isn't willing to address it in any way.
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#16I'm sorry Dinko, but this ain't it.
> On TV, input works very differently. Users navigate with a remote. Movement is discrete. Every interaction requires intention. Each action is one step in a sequence. That difference changes everything.
I just don't want to read articles that are written by LLMs. If there was something you earnestly learned that you think other engineers could benefit from, use your own words to tell us. It's lazy and disrespectful to hand an audience a massive sloppy blob which reeks of GPT 5 and frame it as something you "learned".
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#17As 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.
Who do I send my TV to to figure out why launching the DR app (Danish public broadcaster) on my Philips TV will power on the PlayStation and then crash?
Normally I'd just use the AppleTV, but the kid stole the AppleTV to watch cartoons in the guest bedroom. I continuously surprised that a 10 year old AppleTV still a better option than using the apps that comes with the TV.
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#18The "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…
As an outsider, the fact that cross-device stuff just works in apple's ecosystem is probably the biggest thing I'm jealous of. It's crazy that something as simple as screen casting is still hit or miss when it comes to (android / linux) (web os / chromecast / fire stick)
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#19I enjoy how the website has overridden my browsers scroll bar to use it's own, significantly lower contrast and less visible one, making it much harder to tell where in the article I am. My browser already has a good dark mode scroll bar...
Re: What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
#20The "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…
As an outsider, the fact that cross-device stuff just works in apple's ecosystem is probably the biggest thing I'm jealous of. It's crazy that something as simple as screen casting is still hit or miss when it comes to (android / linux) (web os / chromecast / fire stick)
I just bought binding of Isaac on Apple Arcade for my iPad, a very good surprise was not that the purchase is valid for my Apple TV and iPhone, but that the saves are synced, even in mid session!