alt Hacker NewsWhat I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming from Mobile
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I am at a point where I just installed Bazzite on a mini-itx PC and bought a gyroscope mouse (also called a flymouse) and use steam big picture mode. Access to a proper browser (with adblock) and a proper keyboard more than makes up for the UX problems.
I just wish modern browsers had the (old pre-chromium) Opera browser style of spatial navigation, gyroscope mouses work well enough but spatial navigation is the main feature I miss since I switched off old Opera
> 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...
As 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.
The "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".
I 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.
I 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...
Another thing is lead time. I built an app (https://signagesync.app/) to "multi-chromecast" websites and videos to Android TV, macOS, Windows and hopefully Samsung TV as well.
"Hopefully", because it took me literally 2 months waiting for the reviewer to test my app after it's submitted (to be fair, they did say "expect 6-8 weeks" upfront). They found some issues (crashes), so it was rejected, but I lost interest in resubmitting.
This blog reads like it was written by ChatGPT.
I'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".
Does anyone have experience with professional Brightscript dev? I'm fascinated by it as a web developer looking to find a new niche, but it's like impossible to get into. Seems like every major streaming platform is going to need some experts for the foreseeable future given the install base of Roku at this point, and LLMs are horrible at it.
I'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.