Unfortunately, the only more powerful alternatives are from offshore manufacturers and thus have spotty Android TV support and may not be "authorized" (ie whitelisted) by all encrypted streaming apps (Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, etc). It's bizarre that the most powerful dedicated TV streaming device available today is by far still the NVidia Shield which is essentially a 2015 era design (it got a very minor refresh in 2019 https://androidtvnews.com/nvidia-shield-differences/). It sucks because there are a lot of useful things a TV streaming device could do if it had a little more CPU/GPU headroom (AI upscaling, de-mosaicing, casual and retro-gaming).
Amazon optimise for sales and metrics over anything else.
I take you have some insider knowledge... if the app is hanging for dear life, how is that helping optimize the sales pipeline?
Baseless conjecture.
> Amazon optimise for sales and metrics over anything else.
But healthy sales requires an app that works.
LG TVs capabilities and performance from an app developer perspective is... not great.
Yet every other app on the TV seems to work just fine, with minimal latency and smooth animations. YouTube, HBO, Jellyfin, Netflix, Rakuten even the Vodafone TV application runs smoother, and it's generally the worst of the apps (sans Prime).
Yeah, so I mean if Amazon then developers their own framework + OS on top of React Native, how well do we think that'll go, if they're unable to use things well?
Is it a custom OS (custom kernel and everything) ? Is it a linux distribution?
https://developer.amazon.com/docs/vega/0.21/vega-overview.ht... does not say much...
https://developer.amazon.com/docs/vega/0.21/app-submission.h... "You must have a VPKG file available as an app binary."
I bought the 4K Max thinking it might be the best option for 4K streaming from all of the major providers as an upgrade for my aging Mi Box (3, I think); aside from the home screen being majority advert, the AV sync is constantly out and differs per-app, so changing it for one makes another worse, WiFi signal is poor and the whole thing is only "acceptable" performance wise.
I suppose Amazon is subsidising the pricing, the the advert laden home screen is a given, but AV sync when it's plugged directly into the HDMI port on the TV is appalling. The Prime Video app on it is disgracefully slow to input and browser, but in that department I find Netflix is really the only app that does perform well on the various TV devices I've tried.
At one point, I thought I wanted an Android TV box, but I realise now that I really don't care so long has it has all of the major streaming apps and performs well (a half decent remote is a must too).
I'm able to playback H.265 and AV1 video content at 4k@60 without any issues.
I had one for a bit for the purpose of sideloading FreeTube via adb (I think it was called). That's the only good I can say about it.
Ignoring the missing functionality, I can see one possibility being that the TV's built in computer is just too weak to process video? Would I better off buying a mini-PC to run all of the services off of?
But what seems like the most obvious explanation is that they know they can get by with it because they have exclusive rights to whatever show you're trying to watch.
The only thing the FireTV had as an edge was the Xbox game streaming app which worked fine over WiFi6E. Otherwise it was absolutely ad-ridden, poor UI/UX, and Amazon’s apps suck on any platform. Since I no longer use the Xbox stuff, the stick and the older versions I have line the bottom of some drawer.
The Android TV turned out be almost as ad ridden as the Fire Stick and no obvious outstanding features. Works ok though. I wanted it to sideload some TV apps from another country to stream those TV channels. But the Android apks didn’t behave well on Android TV so into the drawer it went.
The AppleTV can’t run those apps either, they’re not in the store but at least it’s not showing ads and the UI/UX and performance are top notch. Integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem really brings value to me. And that brings me to probably the most important point.
In the end what matters more is what ecosystem you are or want to be in. Unless you have a super specific requirement or ecosystem preference then generally I’d rank them Apple TV > Android TV > Fire Stick. Amazon doesn’t have an ecosystem to speak of so it hard to take it as a serious competitor to Google and Apple.
The only thing that will probably suck is the lack of things like MiraCast and Google's Casting stuff, but you could use third party AirPlay software (still free IIRC) to stream whatever you want if you want to use screen mirroring.
These days people tend to use their media boxes as App Launchers for other services anyway, so it doesn't really matter that much anymore.
I can recommend the app "Stremio" which has an extensive add-on ecosystem you can explore, works on Android, Android TV, Linux, MacOS and Windows!
I've semi-recently gone down the TV platforms rabbit hole again, and my overall impression is that they're all horrible.
I ended up grabbing a 6-year-old mini PC I had lying around in the basement and a >10-year-old TV that my father-in-law was going to throw away, as well as a Logitech y-10 air mouse [1] that I am lucky enough to have bought way back in the day.
I put desktop Linux on the PC with KDE plasma (avoiding Kodi, which, somehow, consistently attracts me but then annoys and frustrates me whenever I actually use it) and Brave.
I cranked up the scaling factor in KDE, and made a tiny tweak so KDE won't ask for superuser passwords and passwords on wallet access.
The browser is the only app I ever use on that thing, although it also has a DVD drive and VLC, and I copied my film collection onto the local disk of that thing.
I logged into all the media platforms I pay for (and the free ones I frequently use) and made an HTML file that links to all of them, using a huge font size, and setting it as home in the browser.
It cost me $0 (considering all the recycling), and it's a better experience than anything that money will buy.
I actually like TVs as a hardware concept, and am a happy paying customer of several VOD platforms, so I would seem to be the perfect customer for all these sticks and mini boxes and smart TV thingamajigs. But the UX is just so horrible. Everything about them screams, “We hate our customers”.
Last time I tried, I found that the VOD platforms I care about have their respective best implementations in their Desktop/Web-versions. Android Apps were not always available, and to the extent that they were, half of them were on Amazon/Fire, half of them on Android TV/Google Play. I remember, in one case (Masterclass), they used the Android App to upsell me on their "Premium" subscription (or maybe it was the download-feature on the Android App).
So I would have had to pay more, switch between multiple HDMI sources to switch to the platform with the app I wanted to consume, and would still have had to use my desktop PC for some of the content I was paying for.
And then, I could never get the apps I actually cared about to occupy most of the screen real estate (or at least be suitably prominently placed). Most of the real estate was dedicated to dark patterns trying to get me to pay for stuff I didn't want to pay for, even though I was already a happy paying customer for more than enough stuff and there wasn't a “give it a rest, already” setting anywhere to be found.
I think that anyone who is technically sufficiently well-versed, is going to avoid that hellscape like the plague. So then, who is the actual audience for this stuff? My guess would be: the old folks' home around the corner, which, sooner or later, will be forced to upgrade those TVs to smart-TVs. And once those old folks put in their credit card numbers or log in with their Amazon accounts, there goes a lot of people's inheritance.
My own elderly father is wise to the scam, but not confident in his ability to navigate the dark patterns. So now, he is afraid to input his credit card information into anything digital, essentially excluding him from cultural participation in the digital age.
It's just such a sad and sorry state of affairs. How did we get here?
At least it (hopefully) means no more stupid "cracked fire TV sticks" on the local market. The end-user-support experience is downright awful and I'm sick of having to explain to people I can't help with them.
The main reason, at least around the people I know, people buy Fire Sticks is to watch football/soccer at 3pm on a Saturday (there's a UK wide blackout to encourage fans to go to their local game, albeit if you're a fan of a club far away or a Premier League team you're going to struggle to get there, games are still aired abroad, IPTV services skirt round this) and to save money on multiple media subscriptions (IYKYK).
I can only imagine after this change people will stop buying them as they're close to useless as people have Smart TVs for the legal stuff.
I don't know if by "people" you mean specifically the people who use them for illegal streams, but there are others of us who buy them.
I have a perfectly good high-end LG OLED TV that's now ~7-8 years old, and I wanted something with better performance (and newer WiFi standards) for streaming apps in 4K, I've used a couple of different boxes/dongles in that time and am currently using a Firestick 4K Max, it sort of does the job but of course it's advert-ridden and has AV sync issues, overall performance is ok, but the Prime Video app is still appallingly slow, Netflix runs great, Disney is ok, and the others are a variety of acceptable to poor.
(And Walmart already has started doing regionlocking to try to crack down on that, too! Taking an ONN box out of the US will error out in setup and complain it's only for sale in US/PR.)
