In the Top Free charts, you need to scroll down to number 56 before you hit an app that’s not about streaming video or music—and it’s the app for Speedtest.net, the app you use to check for connectivity problems. The first workout app is for Peloton, in slot 72. TestFlight, the app that developers use to distribute beta builds of their software to testers, is more popular than any cooking or shopping apps on the Apple TV, and it’s the 122nd most popular free app on the platform. (I’d cover the top paid apps, too, but they’re almost exclusively weird junk, since most apps on the platform are free to download and then use in-app subscriptions to make money.)
Credit:
Apple
Even tvOS 17’s other headlining features, like FaceTime support, emphasize the Apple TV’s secondary or tertiary role in your home’s Apple ecosystem.
Credit:
Apple
Things are equally bleak in the Games tab. It’s mostly populated by aging titles like Dead Cells, Donut County, and Asphalt 8: Airborne; the top free game is Crossy Road, a game that was announced… during the original Apple TV unveiling in 2015. Apple Arcade arguably keeps the platform’s gaming ambitions on life support for those who subscribe to it, but the Apple TV is decidedly not a haven for console-quality game ports.
Cook was sort of right about the future of the Apple TV being apps insofar as third parties are making and distributing their video-streaming apps on the Apple TV’s App Store rather than relying on an Apple-dictated static list of supported third-party services as they did on older Apple TVs. But it has been a long time since Apple talked about the Apple TV like it did at that first keynote in 2015, when it briefly seemed like the box might make your television screen into a full-fledged computing platform.
Instead, the Apple TV has continued being a more enhanced, more flexible, more feature-rich version of the thing it was in the first place: a decent TV-streaming box. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s not quite what Apple planned to do. And it’s why a column of extra icons feels like a bigger upgrade to my day-to-day Apple TV experience than anything else Apple has done in years’ of tvOS updates.
