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Comment by djakjxnanjak | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a no-brainer for both companies when faced with Apple TV having everything.

AppleTV does not have everything, and the UI is horrible compared to many other devices I've seen.

I sold my Apple TV and replaced it with a Roku because the UI experience was so poor. It was frustrating for me to use as an experienced user and basically unusable by any of my guests. The Roku is an amazing experience in comparison and my guests can use it with no instruction necessary.

Roku an amazing experience compared to an AppleTV?

I have three Roku TVs and two AppleTV 4Ks

Problems with the Roku.

- the hardware is severely underpowered and the interface is slow.

- you are the product. This fact comes from the CEO of Roku himself on an interview on Recode Media. He wants to make money selling user data and advertising. You can tell from half the home screen and rye screensaver being cluttered with ads and the remote with hard coded buttons that go to the highest bidder. I have one remote with a hard coded button with “CBS News”. Who would want that as a short cut? I have another one with a useless button to the defunct Rdio service.

- the remote doesn’t even have a way to do a 30s back/forward.

- you can stream from Windows devices but Google is moving away from supporting Miracast and of course you can’t stream from iOS devices.

Also, Apple TV doesn't do YouTube (and other Google things) at 4K. Which sucks, considering you are spending like $200, and YouTube is probably you would use the most.

You can blame Google for this. They insist on using VP9 for their 4K videos despite the fact that no Apple hardware supports VP9 decoding. I'm hoping this changes once Apple adds support for AV1.

You can blame Apple and the many h265 licensing pools for that.

My MacBook Pro hardware supports VP9 decoding I belive. But I'd need to boot into Linux to use it I think.

This, or the Disney streaming service coming soon, could've had something to do with it.

Isn’t the Apple TV app coming to Fire TV as well?

It came to my Samsung TV and i can't uninstall it

Everything except for Spotify :-(

Well, that's on Spotify to do. They've been able to do it forever. Tidal has an Apple TV app.

Isn't Spotify tied up in a dispute about the 30% cut? If they pay 70% to the labels and 30% to Apple that leaves them nothing to operate on.

Couldn't they offer an app with no in-app "buy a subscription" option and avoid paying that Apple tax? I guess added value for existing subscribers isn't very appealing on its own.

Apple has come down hard on devs attempting to do that.

There is an existence proof that that isn’t the case. Spotify, Netflix, Sling, and DirecTVNow are all in the App Store and none of them allow subscriptions from within the App Store.

That is simply proof of selective enforcement. your examples have HUGE preexisting User Base, should apple ban them it would have a real effect on Apple Adoption rates

They are big enough to make apple bow, other apps are not like that

So I guess Linux Academy is also big enough to make “Apple Bow” since you have to subscribe outside of the store?

There isn’t a requirement to make subscriptions only available in the store.

No. Spotify hasn’t allowed you to subscribe through the App Store for years. Netflix has also disallowed new subscriptions through the App Store.

That does not stop Spotify from releasing an AppleTV app.

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