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I'd be curious why Amazon's Prime app has such horrible performance compared to literally every other streaming service, on WebOS at least (on a relatively recent LG OLED). They're all doing more or less the same thing, as far as I can tell as a user at least, yet just moving the focus around in Amazon's streaming app takes 0.5 second while it's instant in other apps. The bandwidth for actual streaming seems the same as the others, so videos start streaming much faster, but the UI is seemingly doing something very wrong, and I don't understand how they could have gotten it so wrong.

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Amazon are bad at consumer software, with the exception perhaps of the kindle. Emphasis on consumer, because they have fantastic enterprise/cloud engineers.

They have, frankly, some of the worst UI/UX design of any company in the same spaces that they exist in. Look at even their store listings, it’s a complete mess of information sprawled over the pages.

They do not optimize for performance or have a culture of squashing UI bugs unless it’s measurably stopping conversion for them.

Hell there’s even been times I’ve reported html issues to their teams and been asked to provide the CSS fixes to them to integrate in.

Never understood this about Amazon. Alexa is a perfect example. When the Echo devices came out around 10 years ago they blew people away with voice UI, and yet the Alexa app was and is a poorly made web wrapper with car infotainment levels of menu-driven UX. Any chance they had of making Alexa a real consumer product died with that piss poor app and the clumsy way they implemented Skills.

>Amazon are bad at consumer software, with the exception perhaps of the kindle

The Kindle has the worst software of any e-ink device on the market.

As someone dealing with AWS daily, I wouldn't say their UI/UX is better on their cloud services. It's certainly the worst of the big three* (with Azure second and Google Cloud best)

* in English speaking markets, don't know about the Chinese providers.

I've noticed this as well. My best guess is either low hardware or just a bad solution.

If they planned to use a unified codebase for Prime app, they likely went with something HTML/CSS-based, which would explain the performance issues. I could be wrong, but it's just a hunch I have.

> My best guess is either low hardware

If there was other apps we use that had the same issue, I'd chalk it up to hardware too, but maybe they simply don't test it on representative hardware? That might explain it.

> they likely went with something HTML/CSS-based, which would explain the performance issues

Not sure, the web browser in the TV seems to handle things just fine, and much faster than Amazon's app, so I don't think HTML/CSS is to blame here. Probably shit architecture/software design, as usual.

> they likely went with something HTML/CSS-based, which would explain the performance issues.

This is the case with a lot of apps that still manage to be performant. So it's quite possible Amazon are writing bad HTML/CSS but that's possible in other languages too.

Indeed, YouTube uses some sort of stripped-down Chromium (Cobalt I think it's called) with the client UI authored in HTML (and friends) for all of their clients and it's not deficient in performance compared to others. The Prime client is notoriously janky, even on Apple TVs, IME.

I would assume they hire competent engineers, so it’s probably something intentional, like an invasion of privacy/user telemetry. At least it doesn’t have AWS’s UX.

> like an invasion of privacy/user telemetry

Could be. Interesting anecdote on that, we're using the Vodafone TV app on the very same TV, and that app you can toggle "send analytics to Vodafone" on or off in the settings, which of course defaults to on.

At one point I toggled it to off, and suddenly the whole app became as fast as all the others, while when the toggle is on, the application is as slow and laggy as the Amazon one. So that might actually very well be the reason.

One other thing that the Amazon Prime app does on LG TVs(and I apologize if you haven't noticed this earlier) - if you are using optical audio output, there's a horrible delay between audio and video, which doesn't really exist in any other app. It's been reported for years, and Amazon isn't willing to address it in any way.

I'm still astonished how poorly optimized the YouTube app is/has always been on Apple TV. It's fucking wild how slow they can make it move about a bunch of rectangular icons, the same unit that can run honest to goodness videogames (if simple ones).

Though I suppose my XBox Series X can run Halo Infinite at 4K/60hz (with a ton of asterisks) and still chokes on the main menu which is also coincidentally a bunch of rectangles.

Maybe rectangles are just really hard to draw.

Huh, that's strange, the YouTube TV app is for us one of the more performant ones, although the UX leaves a lot to be desired. But at least when you move right/down/left/up it does so within 50-100ms, whereas with Amazon's app it sometimes take almost a whole second for the focus on actually move around.

I don't think I've ever noticed any problems with the YouTube app on our Apple TV?

Really it's the only Apple TV app that I regularly have issues with! Sometimes it opens to just a blank gray screen, sometimes you start a video and sits there waiting to start endlessly and doesn't play anything, sometimes it won't send the audio to connected Homepods for mysterious reasons, and even when it works it is so unbelievably slow.

The Nebula app also isn't great, but at least it functions, even if it too is slower that molasses in January.

I think I've once had it freeze and I had to restart the device - but when it is working it is quite snappy. I don't even think its the device - we upgraded from quite an old Apple TV model to a new one and it was equally usable on both.

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