Apple TV Plus

I’ve now tried Apple TV Plus for a few weeks and I can say that the shows are good, but the software is terrible.

I’m only interested in See and For All Mankind so I did not watch anything else, but both are great and well worth a watch if you like the premises of the series. I prefer For All Mankind between the two, but See has on its side being very original.

Apple strength should be in the software, but apparently it is not in this case. We have seen something similar with the first version of Apple Music, the UI looked good, but it was not usable. Searching for similar artists, different albums was a mess and the same is for Apple TV Plus.

I would expect a new app to be far behind the competition when it comes to features, so I tried not to judge it too harshly, but here even the basics are missing.

I won’t comment on the mobile/apple tv apps since I’m not using either, I’m simply watching from the website¹, hopefully the native apps offer a better experience.

Just a few points that sticked out:

There is no way to continue a show or if there is (so I’m told) it doesn’t work most of the times. The UI looks good, but it is unusable. Apple TV Plus has now a few shows and it is already hard to navigate and find the exact show you want to watch, imagine how it would be if it had more shows, let alone the number of shows any Apple TV Plus competitor has.

While trying to select subtitles you need to guess which one is the correct one from a minimum of 2 to a maximum (so far) of 5, all having the same title: English or English (CC), one works, while the rest has no effect. The position of the working one is not even consistent between different episodes of the same show…

Trying to seek ahead to skip the beginning using the left arrow doesn’t work on Firefox (haven’t tried on any other browser), you need to click on the arrows with the mouse.

We are so used to the skip introduction button on Netflix that we were really surprised not to find it and that we had to skip manually.

Ads for other shows that I have already watched is really low. I get that you want to cross promote, but I am logged in with my account and you know which episodes I have already watched, do not show me ads for it!