What I Learned After Building 3 TV Apps Coming From Mobile
Dinko Marinac
How it all started…
I once worked at an agency that took on an Android TV project.
At the time, it seemed like a fairly reasonable task. We already had a solid Android starter. The assumption was that we could reuse most of it, rely on Leanback for the TV specifics, and let design adjust the user experience as the product evolved.
That assumption turned out to be wrong.
Within the first few weeks, the project started to feel unstable in a way that was hard to explain at first. We would fix one issue, ship a build, and then immediately discover new problems that made the app feel broken again.
Every week brought a different kind of failure. Focus would get lost and menus would open seemingly at random. Text that looked fine in mockups was unreadable from the couch. Screens were overloaded with text and interactive elements. Startup and loading times felt unacceptably slow.
At first, it was tempting to treat these as unrelated bugs. Each one looked fixable in isolation.
They were not isolated at all.
They were all symptoms of the same underlying mistake. We were building a TV app while thinking like mobile developers.
A TV app is not a mobile app on a larger screen. The way users interact with it is different. The environment it lives in is different. The hardware is different. Even the development workflow has different failure modes.
Once we understood that, the problems stopped feeling mysterious and started forming a pattern.
UI and UX: Why Mobile Patterns Collapse on TV
If there is one thing that determines whether a TV app succeeds or fails, it is navigation clarity.
Mobile apps tolerate complexity because touch is a very high bandwidth input method. Users can tap anywhere on the screen, scroll freely, recover instantly from mistakes, and generally move through interfaces with little friction.
On TV, input works very differently. Users navigate with a remote. Movement is discrete. Every interaction requires intention. Each action is one step in a sequence.
That difference changes everything.
The reality of distance
A design that looks clean on a laptop or phone can become unreadable when viewed from several meters away. Font sizes that feel modern on mobile often end up too small on TV. Thin font weights lose contrast. Subtle visual hierarchies disappear. Dense layouts turn into visual noise.
Designing for TV is not about scaling things up. It is about redesigning for distance.
Focus is not a detail
On mobile, focus is mostly implicit. On TV, focus is the primary way users understand where they are and what they can do next.
That is why focus related bugs feel so strange. You press right and focus jumps somewhere unexpected. You press down and a menu opens even though you did not intend to open it. You press back and end up in a different part of the app than you expected. Sometimes focus disappears entirely and nothing responds.
When focus is not explicitly designed, it becomes emergent behavior. Emergent behavior is what users experience as randomness.
A good TV app does not simply render components. It defines a navigation system and treats focus as a first class concept.
Density works against you on TV
Mobile interfaces often benefit from density. Users are accustomed to scanning quickly and making fast decisions. Touch makes choice cheap.
On TV, density has the opposite effect. Too much text makes scanning difficult at a distance. Too many interactive elements slow navigation. Too many focusable components turn simple flows into long and frustrating journeys.
What saves time on mobile creates friction on TV.
This is why simply reusing mobile screens fails, even when the app technically runs.
Hardware Reality: TVs Are Weak Devices
Another common blind spot is hardware capability.
In practice, most TV devices are significantly less powerful than modern phones. Startup is slower. Rendering is less forgiving. Memory pressure appears sooner and more often.
This explains the feeling we had early in the project. Loading felt slow. Startup felt heavy. Everything felt slightly behind the user.
The reason is simple. Many assumptions that mobile apps make about performance do not hold on TV.
Cold start matters more than expected
On mobile, platforms and hardware have been heavily optimized for fast app switching and quick returns. Users are used to apps resuming almost instantly.
On TV, the context is different. Users are leaning back. When they open an app, they expect it to be ready. If they see a blank screen or a spinner that lingers, they do not interpret that as work being done. They interpret it as slowness.
Performance issues are usually architectural
When a TV app performs poorly, the cause is rarely a single inefficient function. More often, it is structural.
Too much work happens on the UI thread. Too many heavy views are rendered during the first frame. Images are loaded and decoded without regard for memory constraints. Animations and overdraw accumulate. State changes trigger unnecessary re renders. Network requests block the initial experience.
Because TV hardware is weaker, these costs become visible very quickly.
TV apps reward simple, predictable rendering paths and punish complexity that has not been validated on real devices.
Developer Experience: Why TV Apps Feel Harder to Build
Developing TV apps often feels harder in a very specific way. Problems are less deterministic. Feedback loops are slower. Bugs can look like user error until you reproduce them with a remote in your hand.
Remote input changes how you think
Touch is direct manipulation. Remote input is navigation.
That means you are not just building screens. You are defining how focus moves between states and how users travel through the interface.
Small mistakes compound quickly. One extra focusable element can add dozens of unnecessary button presses. One missing focus boundary can send users into an unexpected part of the app. One incorrect back behavior can trap them in a loop.
On mobile, gestures often mask these issues. On TV, navigation must be deliberate and consistent.
Focus bugs depend on state
Many TV bugs are not pure rendering issues. They are interaction problems that only appear under certain conditions.
They might surface when focus moves in a specific sequence, when a list updates while the user is navigating, when an overlay appears mid animation, when the system UI interrupts the app, or when the app resumes without restoring focus correctly.
This is why TV apps often look stable in demos but break down in real usage.
Emulators are not enough
Emulators are useful, but for TV apps they provide a false sense of confidence.
Real devices differ in performance, input handling, operating system behavior, and memory management. An app that feels fine on one device can feel sluggish or unreliable on another.
This is why testing on real TV hardware is not optional.
Unlike mobile development, where a relatively small set of devices covers most real world behavior, the TV ecosystem is highly fragmented. Without regular testing on actual devices, teams inevitably ship regressions they cannot see during development.
Platform friction affects long term velocity
Beyond development, TV platforms introduce friction in delivery and maintenance.
Each platform has its own quirks, quality expectations, and submission processes. Many issues only appear on hardware, which means testing is not just about correctness. It is about confidence that the app behaves consistently across devices.
Teams that underestimate this rarely fail to build the app. They fail to maintain it without slowing down every release.
Frameworks matter differently on TV
Framework debates often focus on native feel or animation performance. On TV, the priorities shift.
What matters more is whether focus and navigation are treated as first class concerns, whether tooling supports remote based testing, whether UI behavior is predictable across devices, and whether iteration is possible when bugs only appear on hardware.
Some stacks make it easier to reason about navigation. Others make it easy to accidentally build a touch oriented interface that happens to run on TV.
The cost of that choice shows up in engineering time rather than ideology.
Many of the hardest problems in TV development do not live in the code itself. They live in assumptions about how that code will behave once it reaches real hardware.
When Should You Build a TV App?
TV apps often feel attractive because they look like a natural expansion to a new platform. The more important question is whether TV is actually a good fit for the product.
TV apps make sense when the primary value lies in consumption, discovery, simple navigation, or shared experiences.
Streaming platforms, content catalogs, educational libraries designed for passive viewing, and companion experiences with minimal input tend to align well with the medium. In these cases, TV constraints support the product rather than fight it.
TV apps struggle when products require heavy text input, complex workflows, high frequency actions, speed, precision, or dense analytical interfaces.
It is possible to force these experiences onto TV, but doing so usually results in usability issues, increased development complexity, higher support costs, and user churn.
A good TV app embraces what TV is good at instead of resisting its limitations.
A Mental Model for Decision Makers
For anyone evaluating whether to build a TV app, a simple mental model helps.
Mobile apps optimize for interaction and speed.
TV apps optimize for navigation and clarity.
Mobile is personal.
TV is shared.
Mobile input is high bandwidth.
TV input is constrained.
Mobile users tolerate complexity because interaction is cheap.
TV users punish complexity because navigation is expensive.
The most common failure mode follows directly from ignoring these differences.
Teams build TV apps as if they were mobile apps and then spend the entire project reacting to problems that were inevitable from the start.
Most failed TV apps do not fail because of poor engineering. They fail because teams underestimate how different TV really is.
When TV is treated as its own platform from day one, the experience becomes predictable rather than painful. And once it becomes predictable, it becomes possible to build something people actually enjoy using from the couch.
TLDR
The core lesson behind all of this is simple.
Most problems teams run into when building TV apps are not caused by bad code or lack of effort. They come from treating TV as a variant of mobile, rather than as a platform with its own rules.
TV changes how users interact, how interfaces need to be designed, how performance is perceived, and how applications must be tested and maintained. Navigation replaces direct interaction. Focus replaces touch. Hardware constraints surface architectural decisions much earlier. Development slows down when assumptions made on mobile no longer hold on real devices.
None of these differences are subtle once you encounter them, but many teams only discover them mid project, after the architecture and UX direction are already locked in.
Building a successful TV app is less about mastering a specific framework or SDK and more about respecting the medium from the start. When the product, design, and engineering decisions align with how TV is actually used, the platform stops feeling hostile and starts feeling predictable.
That is the difference between constantly fighting fires and building an app that feels calm, intentional, and natural to use from the couch.
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