By Joe Rosensteel

August 1, 2023 8:52 AM PT

57 app icons and nothing good on

Every year I start my annual ritual of installing the tvOS beta on the secondary Apple TV. Not the one in the living room—I’m not crazy—but the one in my office.

This year brings on the biggest, boldest change in tvOS since the release of dark mode in 2017… and that change is scaling down the Home Screen icons so there’s one more app icon per row.

They said it couldn’t be done, but they did it. They increased information density in an Apple product.

The other big changes in tvOS 17 feel like they’ll have more limited appeal. VPN support will help people “visiting” other countries to watch their “local” TV. Adding FaceTime support through continuity camera is something that benefits parent-grandparent conversations on comfortable sofas and people in the one conference room connecting to the people in the other conference room. That kind of stuff.

The high-traffic navigation areas of the Apple TV interface are the Home Screen and the TV app. But why do we still have a Home Screen and a TV app? One is for browsing services, and the other is ostensibly for quick access to media and media discovery that’s relevant to you. On other platforms these things can be combined, so you have a row of favorite apps next to your watch next queue.

But other than icon size, tvOS 17 hasn’t improved anything about the most vital part of the OS: the part that lets us watch TV.

In the beta, the Apple TV app behaves exactly like it has since Apple’s ill-conceived sales-bro-esque revamp of the TV app last October. Since it’s much maligned introduction, it has been slightly tweaked 16 to keep the Up Next row at the bottom of the screen, instead of pushing it off to require a swipe-scroll down.

Apple has also made tweaks to the editorial content of that top carousel of recommendations: It’s still random stuff, including seasons of shows Apple knows I have already watched in their entirety—but now the first 23 items in the carousel are from Apple TV, when previously they were more of a 50/50 split between Apple’s own stuff and the rest of the content on the platform.

While using this beta, I realized that I hadn’t used the TV app in a while. It turns out that Apple’s changes — adding autoplaying video and requiring all those extra swipes — have driven me away entirely. I’ve gone back to just using the Home Screen to launch the app I need, like an animal. (Maybe developers at Apple have changed their behavior too and that’s why we have more Home Screen icons?)

Here’s a pro tip for people on tvOS 16 or 17: Go into Settings: Apps: TV and change “Top Shelf” from “What to Watch” to “Up Next.” Then the top shelf row of the Home Screen will show you your shows without having to open the TV app at all.

Impersonal personalization

Apple’s personalization features are still largely useless if you live in a household with two adult human beings. We watch TV together, and share accounts that are registered to him or me. Apps don’t seem to have done anything with the feature. There’s a new ability for Siri to recognize “up to six” family members voices and recommend content for them, but how relevant can that feature ever be if most viewing is a shared experience or through shared apps that don’t use Apple’s profiles? And wouldn’t it be better to personalize those ridiculous content carousels in the TV app rather than forcing us to than ask Siri what to watch?

My “What should I watch” yielded Alone, Avatar: The Way of Water, Shoresy, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The Orville, John Wick: Chapter 4, Yellowjackets, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Schitt’s Creek, Patriot Games, Blue Bloods, Fantastic Beasts: The Rise of Dumbledore, Survivor, Black Adam, Modern Family, Fringe, Men in Black, The Golden Girls, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Total Recall (the bad one), NCIS, The Suicide Squad, Bob’s Burgers, The Untouchables, So Help Me Todd, Cloverfield, Justified, Alien Code, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Saving Private Ryan. None of those are Apple TV+ titles because—unlike the TV app—Siri seems to know what services I’m subscribed to, and I’m not a current Apple TV+ subscriber. Again, why the inconsistency?

That list doesn’t actually seem personalized, either. I have watched several of those movies, and I’ve also watched an episode of some of them and then stopped watching because it wasn’t for me. It just seems like these results are matched to a generic cis-hetero dad who’s open-minded about progressive issues. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but that is not me.

Also, this list is not the same as the very, very, very buried “For You” row in the TV app. It has overlap, with dad energy, but it’s not identical, and still doesn’t have an understanding of things I’ve watched before. In neither system can I long-press to express that I’ve already watched something, or don’t like the suggestion.

I’m smart, not like everybody says

Apple has no outward facing improvements to smart home stuff via the Apple TV, which is weird, because it’s one of the two types of devices that operate as a hub for all the smart home devices you have. The Matter future that we were promised just hasn’t materialized. Perhaps the silence means that Apple is regrouping on how to handle this, but in the meantime, what it mostly means is that the smart devices connected to my office Apple TV stopped working the other day.

The tvOS Control Center has been refreshed, mostly to shrink it down. The previous version hid smart home stuff behind a tap—but now it’s hidden behind a swipe. I don’t get it. This isn’t a Casio watch—the whole TV is right there, offering plenty of space for buttons. Apple is, in fact, using that space to cram more buttons on the Home Screen. Yet home stuff is buried.

Also, why doesn’t tvOS have widgets? Why can’t I put a smart home widget, or a weather widget, on my Home Screen or in Control Center? Apple has put widgets just about everywhere else—including Stand By on the iPhone, which is all about ambient information on a display in a household.

Beta Luck Next Year

We’re not likely to see new features announced for Apple TV between now and next June, which is a bummer. tvOS 17 avoids a lot of obvious areas for improvement, especially in regard to it as a connected home TV viewing platform.

The thing that should absolutely be tweaked—on all of Apple’s platforms—is the content displayed by the TV app. (Given how much emphasis has been given to Apple TV+ promotion, that seems increasingly unlikely.)

Apple also can’t keep kicking the can on addressing the conflict between the Home Screen and the TV app. (It can’t, right?) So I hope we’ll see something sooner rather than later. But in this case, “sooner” still probably means a year from now.

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]