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Comment by voltagex_ | Hacker News Reader

For both the AppleTV and FireTV, is the Youtube app just a thin wrapper around youtube.com/tv? There doesn't seem to be that many "native" Youtube apps around - it kinda suffers from the same problem that Netflix does in that someone's decided to code for the lowest-common-denominator device [1]. I've heard the Netflix experience on AppleTV is pretty good.

1: WTF, Netflix, why would you remove proper Kinect support from the Xbox One app?

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>WTF, Netflix, why would you remove proper Kinect support from the Xbox One app?

I swear the Netflix app on Xbox is somehow being released in reverse order. Every single time it updates, features are ripped out.

It's not just happening on XB1. I am seeing that on Ps4 and even on iPad.

Try looking for genres and separating tv shows from movies in Netflix on any of those platforms if you don't know what we are talking about.

The YouTube app on AppleTV is a native app, not a wrapper. I don't know about the FireTV (on a side note, the YouTube app for Android TV is also a native app and not a wrapper).

I actually quite like the youtube.com/tv page as a good demonstration of a HTML5 app, though it has some navigation quirks. Before the Apple TV I had a NUC set up with Kodi and Chrome Launcher for when I wanted to use YouTube and I'd use the TV page exclusively.

The new tvOS does not allow web views of any kind (at least not through public APIs), so you can't have any apps that wrap websites. All apps have to be native. I'm not sure about the motivation behind this.

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