“I have no doubt there are engineers inside Amazon who would have loved to have made a great tvOS app for Apple TV. Any craftsperson who takes pride in their work would make all the cogent arguments in the world as to why that was the better — ultimately for everyone, including Amazon — approach,” Rene Ritchie writes for iMore. “Yet all evidence points to one incontrovertible fact: Amazon didn’t give a shit.”
“Amazon Prime Video is the worst app I’ve ever seen on tvOS,” Ritchie writes. “It’s so bad, it’s been roundly panned by the very people who longed for and wanted to love it. It’s embarrassing.”
“Tthe nice thing about bits is that they can be fixed,” Ritchie writes. “Amazon Prime Customers are currently stuck with the terrible port Amazon finally decided to excrete out onto Apple TV. If Amazon listens to the feedback, though, and thinks about what’s really in the best interest of its customers — customers Amazon wants and needs to continue paying for Prime — then the path forward is clear: Make Amazon Prime Video for Apple TV 2.0. Make it from scratch. Make it using the tvOS SDK — or TVML at the very least. And make it freaking amazing. In other words, make it the Amazon Prime for Apple TV app customers deserve.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: At this point, we’re so happy to have it, so happy to have anything that let’s us access Prime content natively on Apple TV, we’ll cut Amazon some slack and let them work on the next version, hopefully designed for the Apple TV from the ground up as the Apple TV consumer is the cream of the crop (i.e. disposable income and the will to spend it, which sounds like something that should interest Amazon, of all companies), and deal with the current app’s shortcomings.
When the content is playing, which is what apps of this sort do for the vast majority of the time, the app’s UI lagginess, UX issues, and other quibbles don’t matter a whit. The Amazon 4K Ultra HD content we’ve seen so far looks stunning.
Here’s to Amazon Prime Video 2.0 – written expressly for tvOS – arriving ASAP!
SEE ALSO:
Amazon Prime Video arrives on Apple TV in over 100 countries; Apple TV app adds live sports in the U.S. – December 6, 2017
Amazon Prime Video for Apple TV now available – December 6, 2017