alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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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.
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.
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.
I'm still astonished how poorly optimized the YouTube app is/has always been on Apple TV. It's fucking wild how slow they can make it move about a bunch of rectangular icons, the same unit that can run honest to goodness videogames (if simple ones).
Though I suppose my XBox Series X can run Halo Infinite at 4K/60hz (with a ton of asterisks) and still chokes on the main menu which is also coincidentally a bunch of rectangles.
Maybe rectangles are just really hard to draw.
Amazon are bad at consumer software, with the exception perhaps of the kindle. Emphasis on consumer, because they have fantastic enterprise/cloud engineers.
They have, frankly, some of the worst UI/UX design of any company in the same spaces that they exist in. Look at even their store listings, it’s a complete mess of information sprawled over the pages.
They do not optimize for performance or have a culture of squashing UI bugs unless it’s measurably stopping conversion for them.
Hell there’s even been times I’ve reported html issues to their teams and been asked to provide the CSS fixes to them to integrate in.