I sold my Apple TV and replaced it with a Roku because the UI experience was so poor. It was frustrating for me to use as an experienced user and basically unusable by any of my guests. The Roku is an amazing experience in comparison and my guests can use it with no instruction necessary.
Roku an amazing experience compared to an AppleTV?
I have three Roku TVs and two AppleTV 4Ks
Problems with the Roku.
- the hardware is severely underpowered and the interface is slow.
- you are the product. This fact comes from the CEO of Roku himself on an interview on Recode Media. He wants to make money selling user data and advertising. You can tell from half the home screen and rye screensaver being cluttered with ads and the remote with hard coded buttons that go to the highest bidder. I have one remote with a hard coded button with “CBS News”. Who would want that as a short cut? I have another one with a useless button to the defunct Rdio service.
- the remote doesn’t even have a way to do a 30s back/forward.
- you can stream from Windows devices but Google is moving away from supporting Miracast and of course you can’t stream from iOS devices.
Also, Apple TV doesn't do YouTube (and other Google things) at 4K. Which sucks, considering you are spending like $200, and YouTube is probably you would use the most.
You can blame Google for this. They insist on using VP9 for their 4K videos despite the fact that no Apple hardware supports VP9 decoding. I'm hoping this changes once Apple adds support for AV1.
Couldn't they offer an app with no in-app "buy a subscription" option and avoid paying that Apple tax? I guess added value for existing subscribers isn't very appealing on its own.
There is an existence proof that that isn’t the case. Spotify, Netflix, Sling, and DirecTVNow are all in the App Store and none of them allow subscriptions from within the App Store.