The Apple TV+ Website
The TV app is pretty bad across the board, as I have discussed many times before and will seemingly have to talk about it again with no announced changes on the horizon.
The degree to how bad it is varies per platform. The available features and UI differ wildly depending on which device you are using to access the Apple TV app. The tvOS Apple TV app version is by far the best expression of the app. Then, you have the app for smart TVs and Amazon Fire/Roku (and soon, games consoles) which try to mirror the tvOS experience and somewhat achieve it. The iPhone and iPad interpretation of the TV app trails significantly behind that, and even further back you have the primitive Mac app which doesn’t support the basics like the ability to autoplay the next episode or skip the intro. I’d argue the implementations of those features on tvOS and iOS are mediocre, but the Mac doesn’t have them at all.
However, the award for the worst experience belongs to the Apple TV+ website found at tv.apple.com. Since the service launched on November 1st 2019, the website has always been incredibly barebones. It is a single flat list of Apple TV+ shows and movies, there’s no Channels or iTunes Store content here, arranged in a seemingly random order with no way to filter by content type, genre or release date. At launch, this was just about passable because the service had only 8 titles. A year on, it is simply embarrassing.
There’s no Up Next queue, no search field and also no support for autoplaying the next episode or skipping intros. You can’t even access all the content that is on TV+ through the website: library titles like Long Way Down, Long Way Round or the classic Fraggle Rock episodes are not listed at all. Occasionally, flagship Apple originals like Servant are inexplicably missing.
The web app, if you can call it that given how it is just barely more sophisticated than a static HTML page, also suffers from reliability issues. Many people are unable to actually play content successfully on the website, as odds on you will be presented with a black screen where the video is supposed to be. This issue occurs most frequently when using browsers other than Safari and Chrome. Apple also requires the logged-in account to have a credit card on file before you are allowed to attempt to watch anything, even with an active paid subscription. This restriction does not apply for any of the platform apps.
Apple doesn’t release usage statistics but I expect the web is a popular way people try to access TV+. For one thing, the web app is the only option for Windows and pre-Catalina macOS users. Moreover, with no native Android app in sight, I’ve seen a lot of people try the website on their non-Apple phones and tablets to catch Ted Lasso or the Peanuts specials or whatever. These are all potential customers, ready and willing to pay for Apple’s services.
As a company, Apple has never been known for its web apps, but it’s not like it doesn’t know how. Apple Music has a decent web client. The iCloud.com apps are technically sophisticated and reasonably feature-rich, particularly the iWork web apps.
Perhaps even more frustratingly, Apple’s very own marketing pages for TV+ feature a dynamic and appealing carousel of TV+ content; you have to scroll down a little to see it. This layout should be the basis of a TV+ web app, and frankly the richness and aliveness of it should inform the future of all the native Apple TV apps too.