tvOS 26 Announced
Featuring a stunning new design with Liquid Glass, tvOS 26 is designed to keep the focus on what’s playing so users never miss a moment. The Apple TV app also now showcases cinematic poster art that makes it fun and easy to discover what to play next. Enhancements to profile-switching and a streamlined way to log in to apps make it easier than ever to access entertainment, while updates to Apple Music Sing bring users new ways to enjoy singing along with friends using iPhone.
tvOS 26 adds a non-deletable home screen icon for Apple Music Sing; it’s just a shortcut to a section of the Music app. As I have no other choice, I guess I’ll bury it in a folder.
Previously:
Update (2025-06-11): Tim Hardwick:
Apple’s tvOS 26 announced at WWDC requires second-generation Apple TV 4K devices and later, which means the company is excluding older hardware from the update’s major visual overhaul.
What tvOS needs is a comprehensive overhaul of the concept of the home screen. For years there have been two competing home screens: the original app-based home screen, and the newer
Apple TV+content-based TV app. Real nerds, like me, know the TV app sucks and use the app-based home screen. The TV app has not been improved in terms of personalization or customization at all.The sign-on feature once again requires adoption by streaming apps in order to work, and it’s tied to your Apple ID. Good luck with that getting widely adopted over QR codes and authorization URLs.
[…]
For some reason Apple decided to buck industry trends and all the show art tiles are movie posters now. I get it, it seems cinematic to evoke movie posters, but the interface is on a 16:9 screen. Use your noodles. This means that you get to see one row clearly. To make up for that, the show text is overlaid on top of the poster art with stylized fonts, like Photos Memories, making the shows harder to read. This change needs to be reverted.
See also: Sigmund Judge.
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Burying OS crap in a folder. Been doing that for a few years now (that's the folder name, "OS Crap"). Guess it's time to do this on Apple TV hardware. Just hope I get a choice of names for the folder.
Dave, you're doing it wrong. The correct name for that folder is 💩. Much easier to identify as the folder you would rather not open.
It took us ten years to be able to delete unwanted apps on iOS. And then ironically Apple flipped that on its head. I can remove News from my iPhone, but not my Mac. Can remove music from iPhone, but not TV.
Times like this I'm glad Apple decided my Apple TV 4K is too old for karaoke because...it...doesn't have a USB C remote?
Joe Rosensteel: "Real nerds, like me, know the TV app sucks and use the app-based home screen."
I don't know... In my house, I'm the technical one, and I like the way AppleTV+ works. I wish it did more, like making it easier to discover new shows across streaming apps. But once I watch a show from any of those, it shows up in the 'Watchlist' strip at the top, making it easy to watch the next episode. Not all streaming services support this, so anything on, say, Amazon Prime doesn't show up there. So it's not perfect by any stretch. Hopefully it'll get better as time goes by.
But this is personal preference, I think. My wife does *not* like using AppleTV+ to get to her shows. Even though the next episode of whatever is queued up for her in the Watchlist, she prefers to go into each streaming app to watch a show.
@DJ: I know it won't make any difference to Apple, but if they move the Apple TV to only using the TV app, I will probably move our entire house to something else. Both my wife and I /hate/ the TV app with all of its content pushing and uncontrollable content previews and such.
It just isn't family friendly to the point that when we have to use it, we send the children out of the room first.
@gildarts: Yeah, I get that. If I still had kids at home, I think I would worry more about that. When the grandkids are over, I keep a tighter rein on what pops up. :-)
I wonder if the new AppleTV profile stuff will help with that? If a Kids profile (or a kid's profile) could have an age range or rating limit, maybe that would help?
