The rest of the apps are mainly display and a little bit of crud.
It's so easy for them to continue to experiment with the front end all the time -- because it's "not that hard" (tm).
But the video serving? Rendering? Streaming in different resolutions? The video player? CDN's? Damn, that sh*t rough brah.
It's also interesting on the other end, what cool stuff can be done on the PS5 for example? Shaders and animation techniques are also pretty interesting to explore.
So much for Apple "lifetime support", half of the store apps you want to use can't be installed anymore. If you don't have an iTunes backup, you're SoL.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250476703
The same works for Plex.
If you have ever installed it anywhere you can reinstall it.
BTW, Apple never promised “lifetime support”.
It's impossible to install old versions of apps without ever having "owned" them, even if they're free. Your "solution" also doesn't work for all apps on the store, quite a few of them don't offer old versions anymore at all.
I noticed the same with the Kindle app.
Making a robust, consistent, fast user experience that works well across all devices, resolutions, and network conditions is quite hard.
If it was easy then fewer websites would suck.
One thing I found was when emulating mobile screen size I wasn't able to horizontally scroll with my track pad. It works on Netflix though. I'm betting you'll find 100+ of those 'small' things with user testing across different OS/browser combinations.
I'm yet to experience a media streaming product that can hold a candle to Netflix in terms of UX on any platform.
On my 2017 (non-Android) 4K "Smart" TV, the Netflix app is light years beyond everything else for UX, performance, everything, there's just no competition.
The hard stuff is licensing content, IMHO. The technical bits aren't easy, but they're mostly straight-forward stuff that small teams can work on and make incremental progress towards. Having an existing large base of revenue and users and having a clear focus enabled Netflix to get licenses and make a good experience, and continually improve it (although, I have some nits to pick, of course).
Other companies have streaming services of course, but none of them have the organizational focus to make things work as well, IMHO.
This is the basic reason why, though I'm sure they pay the engineers "well," they're not getting the $500 million deals the high profile writers and directors are getting.
But it's not harder than most other IT niches one might get into. I am not saying it's without challenges - I pulled plenty of hair. Just that it's doable and that all the parts one might need are available for me to built into a usable system.
Scaling that up will might be hard in the sense that it's a lot more expensive, but the core technology is there.