HBO Max to Completely Overhaul Buggy Apple TV App By End of Year

foobarbaz said:
Nothing good has ever come from a complete rewrite, though.

We developers think it’s the easiest way to fix all bugs, but unless the underlying structural problems (like bad QA, wrong priorities) are fixed, it typically ends up worse.

Fingers crossed, though.
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Entirely not true. This was likely a case of the developers trying to take shortcuts by having a single codebase work across muitple platforms, instead of targeting each platform individually. My bank tried to pass off a web-based "mobile app" and it was a horrible experienee. They completely rewrote it, and while it still seems to be web-based (I believe), it feels vastly more native than the first attempt and I haven't had any complaints in years since they did that.
 
friedmud said:
Agreed - Peacock is also using some nonstandard video player crap that is absolute junk.

why do these companies do this?
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I believe it's highly opinionated developers that don't understand the benefits of being "native" on a platform. They may be emotionally attached to a particular approach or think they are reducing costs by taking certain paths, but the result is usually only reducing the quality of the user experience.
 
You really have to wonder what's going on at HBO. First, they basically threw out the epic HBO brand in favor of HBO Max (the logo doesn't even say HBO anymore).

Then, they started shipping garbage apps that ruin the user experience.

HBO used to stand for the premium experience in TV programming.

Those were the days...
 
HBO Max, for me, can't seem to keep track of what I've watched. Viewed shows keep showing up in Up Next, even if I re-enter "Mark Episode [or Movie] as Watched.]

Peacock's overall interface makes me the craziest. And YouTube and the ridiculous Spectrum (as cited by @name99 above) are like junior-high-school coding projects.

Coincidentally started this poll a week ago, just for fun.
 
name99 said:
Oh no, not close! Someone clearly has never used the Spectrum app...

You want bad UI? How about
- always launch the app into your PoS Spectrum 1 channel that no sane human has EVER chosen to watch?
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I think there's a setting in the app to change what channel it launches on. Check Settings>Preferences>Startup Channel.
 
I hadn't had any problems with it. Used it yesterday, no problem. Then, this morning BAM, it just keeps crashing once I launch it. Even rebooted the AppleTV and still get the same thing. It was JUST working yesterday, and they hadn't updated it between yesterday and today, but for whatever reason, it just started crashing.
 
Oddly enough, I have no issues with the app on my Apple TV's. But the iPad app has been crap since its launched.

I've been wanting to report the issues but don't know how to. Anyone know how? Using it for my kids to have offline viewing in my car would save car rides, but it keeps crashing.
 
Developers don’t often write native code when they have to deploy to many devices with various OS features and guidelines. They’ll choose something that can be written once and deployed everywhere.

Trying to tell a developer to “just conform” to whatever one specific platform offers is ridiculous. That serves only that one specific audience without addressing all other platforms.

It does sound like rewriting the client apps for HBO Max is a good idea. As they said, they reused the old code from HBO Go and HBO Now which were designed under completely different use cases and mashed together. They can improve their code base, provide a better experience for their customers and streamline their maintenance processes for future bugs by building for their new business model. And they don’t have to screw with the old code while they do it. So the old apps can be as stable as they have been and maintained separately until the relaunch occurs.

No. Rewriting is not always the best idea and I’m not 100% it really is a good idea based on the info we have. But there are many benefits if done properly and if there is good reason to rewrite.

Once a rewrite is done and successfully deployed, then they can focus on quality of life improvements in a much more efficient manner.
 
Wish they’d do the same with the YouTube app … using it is like mental torture and it’s god awful interface makes the new improved remote feel almost as useless as the old one … pause a video and … 🤦‍♀️
 
Can we get an update to Paramount+ while we're at it? It is unusable. UI never loads. Sometimes takes several minutes to launch the app and look for content, and then heaven help you if you actually want to navigate to a page.
 
Wel the volume issue is probably the source contnrnt, as far as I know yt does not check sound fir copliance t ebu standards, so a lot of creators just crank ther mix to max (as long as it doesn't clip it's all good) whereas all the uther streaming services hsve some standards ( or the content source have standards) so the audio keveks are generealy a bit lower. Yt coult ofc tell their apps to lower the volume Xdb but then the creators actually caring about sound and doing it close to well would complain. Net result yt will always sound louder, but you have to bkame the content creators for that, or yt for not setting standards when it comes to sound
 
I can't seem to use the 'Skip' button for bypassing intros, I just have to fast forward. Anyone have this working for them?
 
HBO's app is not as bad as some other Apple TV apps, like Paramount+ which freezes and has to be rebooted every time we (try) to use it.
 
Timo_Existencia said:
And to be honest, the Apple TV+ app on Firestick has been problematic.

What's actually going on here? These apps, from a layman's perspective, should be relatively easy apps to build relative to the Universe of apps. Why are there such widespread problems? Ff, Rev, Pause, a database of content...I don't get why in 2021 these major companies all seem to be struggling with such a basic product.
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More effort spent on DRM and dynamic ad placement
 
Timo_Existencia said:
I seriously don't know how a company with the size and history of HBO could have gone so wrong on mobile platforms.
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Remember that AT&T bought the whole company 3 years ago, similar to what they did with DirecTV in 2016(?). Now they've jettisoned the entire thing at a massive loss. Hopefully they'll have the freedom to make the much-needed platform improvements.
 
here's a bug.

the app doesn't provide thumbnails of its content to the Apple TV main menu

(all the other apps do)
 

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