On Netflix Recently ‘Ruining’ Its tvOS App
Chance Miller wrote this week for 9to5 Mac Netflix has “ruined” the user experience of its tvOS app by ditching the stock video player in favor of its own customized thing. He notes the switch occurred “a few weeks ago,” adding frustration is “mounting” evidenced by subscribers threatening to cancel because the update is so user-hostile.
“Netflix has once again made a controversial change to its Apple TV app. In recent weeks, the company has stopped using the native tvOS 26 video player in favor of a custom player similar to the one it uses on other TV platforms,” Miller wrote on Wednesday. “In practice, this makes the most common interactions more cumbersome and blocks users from using platform-specific Apple TV features.”
He also said deprecating the stock video player as Netflix (and others) have “means you lose access to full payback controls using the Apple TV Remote app on your iPhone.” As Miller notes, you can’t toggle Enhance Dialogue, nor can you rewind and have captions/subtitles automatically appear. There are other examples, but the salient point is users lose a lot of platform niceties when companies decide to roll their own UI designs instead of using the stock controls. John Gruber said on Daring Fireball he believes the change by Netflix “sucks,” adding “there’s no upside at all [and] nothing is better, much is worse, and a slew of cool platform features are now gone.”
As I quipped on Mastodon, Netflix’s decision is more impactful than sheerly losing a bunch of cool platform-specific features. The bigger loss is, as ever, about accessibility; from a user perspective, Netflix’s custom video player runs the risk of being inaccessible. As I said, a huge benefit to developers opting for the stock UI elements is, in this case, Apple gives you accessibility “for free”—to wit, the stock video player on Apple TV 4K has already been built to play nicely with, say, VoiceOver labels or Zoom, for instance. The aforementioned risk comes when, whether Netflix or some other developer, decides to roll their own UI—customizability is okay, mind you—and they don’t do their due diligence in ensuring their custom player works with VoiceOver, et al. And it’s not just about screen-reading or zooming; indeed, any custom textual elements and buttons need to work well just as well with larger text sizes too.
I covered Netflix’s big redesign of its app last year, and I like it very much. I admittedly haven’t noticed the recent change to the video player, but can say (for whatever it’s worth) Netflix does care a great deal about accessibility. Also last year, the company’s now-former director of product accessibility—and like me, a fellow CODA—Heather Dowdy bylined a blog post in which she reflected upon “a year of progress in accessibility” for the company as part of marking Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
