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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

> It's amazing to me that Roku has the plurality of the US streaming market (37%), yet its development ecosystem is so terrible.

Step 1: be a cheap (the cheapest?) option in the early phase of a market. This way you build up a sizeable customer-base using a market-segment with low/no expectations.

Step 2: app-developers will be forced to support your platform, despite low-quality platform, ecosystem or SDK if they want to be “everywhere”.

Step 3: With better/more popular apps supporting your platform you can start making more expensive devices or even sell/rent your platform to other players needing a checkbox to check before they can launch (ie smart-TVs).

Roku is really crap to use, but by playing by this book they’ve seemingly done well (as a business) so far.

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"Roku is really crap to use"

I have used Google TV, Fire TV, Apple TV and Roku. I have used Roku both as a separate device and built into a TV. Out of them all I prefer to use the Roku. I even sold an Apple TV which was given to me and used part of the sale to replace it with a Roku Premiere+ which I found to be a much better experience.

Apple TV's touch remote is a travesty. Their UI is equally annoying when you realize they advertise the Apple stuff first, and you have to click Home again to get to your main apps. Compare any of them to Roku, and Roku is a barebones, works as expected, channel choosing device.

> touch remote is a travesty

> you have to click Home again to get to your main apps

Both of these are changeable via settings (if you’re talking about the current generation remote, if the old one an Apple TV can be trained to use any other remote). I have a bunch of Roku devices and an Apple TV and typically prefer the Apple TV: the apps are of higher quality, Airplay is a great added feature and most importantly: no ads. Roku used to have barely any but they’re adding more and more and it’s getting obnoxious.

My experience with Apple TV was that Apple advertised their own apps regularly. Also most Roku devices released in the last couple of years including Roku TVs support Airplay.

Where did you see these ads? I see no ads at all on my Apple TV so I’m curious.

I'm confused by this too, and prefer Apple TV because it doesn't display ads. In my experience Roku does continue to display "special" ads, even if you turn off all user-controllable options.

I think parent commenters are referring to how the Apple TV app — which is great, but can be avoided by using the Home screen — aggregates all available content, and has a dedicated Apple TV+ tab. In other words, the Apple TV app is also the Apple TV+ app.

My experience reflects OP's as well. It's not "ads", but things like searching using the SEARCH button inside a non-Apple app returns results from the Apple store.

If one uses it in a search box inside the app, it works in the local context. Imagine having to teach one's elderly parents what the difference is when the remote only has something like 5 buttons and one of them doesn't work how it's supposed to in a consistent manner. Local context vs. global context in searches is an absurd concept in the purview of the average consumer. Hell - I can't understand it half the time because it's so counterintuitive.

That's shady behavior and prioritizes Apple's own services over EVERY competitor.

Besides its terrible remote (the gen I have, at least), the usability constraints are insulting.

Roku has other severe limitations, but they don't outright manipulate their UI and their user experience in such an underhanded manner.

Roku has had airplay for a while now.

Also there's no software configuration to change that terrible touch remote into something usable. Rewinding to catch a missed line is always "I hope it works" moment.

I won’t defend that remote but the good news is that Apple TV doesn’t ship with it any more. It’s back to a much more normal one.

> Apple TV's touch remote is a travesty.

The old one was justifiably maligned, but the current one is great.

I've experienced the use of about three different Roku TV's and they have a tendency to crash regularly with Netflix. I'm guessing Netflix is sucking up all the limited ram available on these TV's As the App is unbearably sluggish to use.

It is a bit ironic that Roku, which started life as a “Netflix Box” and developed this limited development ecosystem in order to perform on cheap hardware (they always wanted to keep the price under $100) now crashes using Netflix on underpowered devices. Note: as stated above Netflix uses non-public C APIs to run their own engine.

I've used an old roku express, a roku TV and a new 4k roku (forget what the model was but it was made in 2020) and they all have the same app problems

Disney plus crashes more often than not in any given watching session.

Hbo Max tends to crash on the menu about 50% of the time.

Netflix crashes fairly often but not as bad as those other two.

I think it's still the best single solution for streaming but they really do need some quality control on their apps.

Having to wait for your TV to restart in the middle of a movie is never great.

I have used a Roku Express, Roku Premiere+ and now have 2 4k TCL Roku TVs. I have never had an app crash and use Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max regularly.

This has been my experience as well, at least with my TCLs. Never had a crash despite using Netflix, Disney+ and YouTube.

My second Roku from many years ago (first angry birds one) will crash occasionally using Netflix, will crash hard and reboot itself. Probably a thermal issue. Pretty anemic performance too. I think the software now just stresses the old hardware to the max. But to their credit, it was still receiving updates and worked. Finally retired it and replaced with new version and haven’t had it crash yet.

On my 4K TCL TV, I've had quite a few issues with the Roku Netflix and Hulu appa... occasionally in Netflix it will just show garbled data whenever you try and play something, or on Hulu it will just refuse to actually start a show (I've noticed this happens mostly with only very specific series...) Solution is usually to restart the TV. Never had any issues while it's actually in the middle of playing anything though.

Are you sure it’s a crash? I used to think my apps were crashing until my remote batteries ran out and I was too lazy to replace them using the phone app instead.

And I noticed the “crashes” disappeared. Turns out there’s a bug with my remote that seems to automatically send a home signal to the device. But it’s also strange because it affected different apps differently.

I rarely saw it with Netflix. But YT was almost guaranteed.

I've used them all as well. I've found the best to be a rooted android TV box. idk if they still make them like they used to, but the Nexus player was by far the best TV box I've used after installing Kodi, adblock, and rooting.

I would love a dumb TV with one of these lil boxes again, but finding dumb TVs is hard and they're usually expensive and for commercial use from what I've found

I have the latest and most expensive Roku that was available as of a year ago.

The thing struggled to keep sound and video in sync every time I disable or enable captions and then requires a restart to fix the issue.

That’s literally the most basic function this device is supposed to support and it cannot. I have never seen such a problem with any other device I’ve used, including a variety of chrome casts, a fire stick, an Apple TV, an XBox/XBox One, and even XBMC (installed on the original XBox), a variety of RPi solutions, etc.

> Roku is really crap to use

I disagree, I find the Roku experience to be quite easy to use and it does what I want with no surprises in the UX.

I think they might have meant "crap to develop for"?

“Easy” and “enjoyable” are different things. The Roku UI is extremely slow/jittery (even on the fastest models) and the layout of their software keyboard, in combination with the design of their remote (and/or smart TV remotes), makes entering text take an eternity as well. (And their voice support isn’t good enough to rely on in place of it.)

When a Roku is just sitting there doing its thing, it’s fine; but when you have to get it to do something else, it’s like a line at the DMV.

I think the software keyboard is a per app design, which is either a ding or a bonus (dev flexibility). Regardless, if you have to spend time typing/searching, using remote on phone is best, where you can use the phone’s keyboard.

I have Roku spread across our entire renovated house including an outbuilding. Rock solid. 4 devices. Teamed up with Plex, and has been a fantastic experience so far (1 year and counting).

Simple. Solid. Works.

Nothing but praise from my side.

Literally, thank Gawd, as native TV smart apps are an absolute waste of time (they might as well retire them all now) and I don't want to get sucked into the other ecosystems.

Roku basically benefitted from 2 things: 1) The constant battles between Apple, Google, Amazon, where removing or not adding their specific media distribution channel to each others platforms was used as leverage in all sorts of unrelated negotiations. This meant that Roku was for the longest time the only device that supported AppleTV, Google, Prime Video.

2) Google’s insistence on it having a physical remote for their Chromecast players which in itself was likely a result of the fiefdoms which led to Chromecast and Google TV being separate products for the longest time.

Both of these things are not true anymore. Roku is no longer a neutral platform. And Google Chromecast now comes with a remote.

I see very little reason to pick a Roku over the Chromecast with Google TV and I suspect that Roku’s disadvantages will only worsen with v2 of the Google device.

I think the Roku Ultra is a great product, can't speak to the other levels, but it works really well in comparison to google's parade of stuff, amazon fire stick, apple tv, and smart tv apps on Samsung, LG, and Sony TVs. Also the remote finder is quite handy.

For me, the best aspect of it was their openness. All of the other competing products had their own streaming services, which meant problems with the other providers- why they spun this off from Netflix in the first place. This means the search will go across the different services to answer the pressing question of the day- which service is this content on and at what price? I was considering starting a company to offer this service until Roku met my need there.

Now though, the battle with Google over YouTube has me suspicious of this status. The temptation to chase recurring revenue streams is quite high.

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