Apple Software

Yesterday Google unveiled a major update to their YouTube App for the Apple TV. It’s a major change in that it abandons the long used design philosophy that their Apple TV app used in favor of their more standardized Android based design.

The overwhelming public reaction to this abrupt design change has been mostly negative and quite loud in the online community. The app has abandoned what was a design UI that was uniquely suited for the apple TV and its remote, and replaced it with what seems to be a port of the Android TV app.

In doing so a lot of functionality has been lost to the point of making the app almost unusable on the Apple TV. Some examples:

– The subscription list is sorted in alphabetical order and can only be swiped through horizontally. So if you have 200 subscribed channels and you want to get to the last one you will literally have to left swipe through all 200 of them.

– Categories and suggested content have been pushed right up front in an apparent effort to force users into contnet they are not choosing for themselves. Never heard of Logan Paul? Well you will be forced to be acquainted with him and others like him soon.

– Silly auto preview. Do I really need to have a preview of a video that may only have a short run time? this works on Netflix where the preview is a trailer of a much longer feature, but this is just sill the way it is implemented here.

– No 4K after all. All this ridiculousness and there is still no accommodation for 4K content on Apple TV. Google is adamant about the VP9 codec rather than the h.264 that pretty much everyone else uses.

So there is lots of talk at public forums such as Reddit and Mac Rumours on this and most Apple TV users are aghast. What do you think of these changes?