[unethical_ban]

The rumor/theory I have heard about Netflix is that increasing discoverability too much would allow people to see two negative traits of Netflix: How often things come and go from the platform (which other apps like Criterion Collection embrace), and just how limited their library actually is at a given time.

Scroll through recommendations. It looks like they have hundreds of great movies for you to watch! And yes, technically they do. But look how many times they try suggesting the same movies in different categories, inflating the view in a way to make the library seem bigger. One movie might show up "Because you liked comedy..." then "Because you watched <comedy movie>" then "Light-hearted movies".

TLDR money and masking their poor library quality.

[reuben364]

I wonder if AppleTV's atrocious single-line onscreen keyboard fits into this picture of making things less discoverable, or if it's just an extreme of form over function.

[s3p]

Definitely not, because Apple gives users the ability to type search in on an iPhone or iPad instead of using the apple TV remote. They also let you do voice-to-text, which is nice.

[Swenrekcah]

It is entirely possible to both provide a useable onscreen interface and the iPhone connection option.

[Swenrekcah]

Whatever the reason (and I can think of many) it just shows how Apple is past the point of caring for their users.

[khazhoux]

I’m about to enable the new Facetime Live Transcription feature in iOS 16 so my wife can have conversations with her father, who is rapidly losing his hearing. For this reason (and I can think of many) I strongly disagree.

[Swenrekcah]

Fair enough, but that’s also a cool new feature that drives sales.

I meant it more like, why wouldn’t they fix this objectively bad input mechanism? It would take tiny effort but it wouldn’t improve their sales or they might even calculate that it drives usage of iPhones and therefore good for them even though it’s bad for the users.

For the record I own both an Apple TV and an iPhone, inasmuch one can pretend to own these devices.

[notjtrig]

I had to look up this linear keyboard they created, pretty unique.

Seems like it can be changed.

Settings > General > Keyboard, then switch from “Automatic” to “Grid”.

[Swenrekcah]

Wow! Thanks!

For some reason I wasn’t getting automatic updates but after a manual update I can now see and set this option.

I retract my earlier statements, thank you Apple devs!