Android TV vs Apple TV: The Best Platform for Your TV Right Now – AppleTV 4 Jailbreak (appletv4jailbreak.com)
Photo: Nvidia/Alex Cranz/Gizmodo
If you want Google or Apple software running on your big screen TV as well as on your phone, you’ve got a few options: On the Apple side, the Apple TV box, and on the Google side, the Android TV platform built into sets from the likes of Sony and TCL, and also showcased very well on the Nvidia Shield TV.
So at the end of 2019, is it the Apple TV with tvOS or Android TV that’s on top? Should you just pick the one that matches your phone, or is there more to the story? Are Apple and Google actually really serious about developing software and apps for screens that can stretch to 50 inches and more?
We sat down with an Apple TV 4K running tvOS, and a first-gen Nvidia Shield TV running Android TV to compare the user experiences, the app selection, and the choice of features on both these platforms. If you’ve got your own experiences of these two platforms to share, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below.
Interface and Use
As you might expect, if you’ve used Android on any screen larger than 7 inches, the Android TV interface is rougher around the edges than its Apple counterpart. Both Android TV and tvOS take the familiar approach of using rows of icons showcasing your apps and your content, and both are easy to navigate.
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On the Android TV side, certain apps—including YouTube, Plex, Spotify and Twitch—will feature certain content you might like right on the home screen (like a recommended YouTube video or a daily playlist from Spotify). Further down the screen you get your apps, then your TV inputs (if you’re using an Android TV set rather than a box), then settings.
Android TV.Photo: Gizmodo
The Apple TV interface is a lot more polished. It’s fair to say! You get big previews of what you’ve got ‘up next’ in your various apps, though obviously there’s some preference towards Apple services. You don’t get the same kind of previews for recommended content on app icons that you do with Spotify and YouTube on Android TV, for example.
There are really two interfaces on tvOS on Apple TV now: The main TV app, which Apple wants you using most of the time, and which brings all your movies and shows together across all the apps you’ve got installed (with some notable exceptions, including Netflix). Then there’s the older rows of app icons, where you can get at your games, photos, and music—everything that isn’t video or tied into Apple’s ecosystem (like Netflix).
Searching is more or less comparable across both services, though the Apple interface is nicer to look at and yet less comprehensive. Both tvOS and Android TV let you search with your…
https://gizmodo.com/android-tv-vs-apple-tv-the-best-platform-for-your-tv-r-1840469491
