tvOS 17’s extra column of icons is its most useful new feature in years

Consider this a mini-review: Apple is releasing tvOS 17 today, and the update is probably the most useful one that Apple has released since the very early days of tvOS in 2015. Why? Not because of some stunningly innovative new feature or a great app that tames the tangle of competing streaming services. It's because Apple added an extra column of app icons. There are now six icons in a row instead of five. Revolutionary. That probably comes across as more sarcastic or cutting than poor tvOS deserves. It is genuinely nice to have that extra column of icons, particularly in the top row where apps can use the carousel that consumes the top half of the Apple TV's home screen. I also like tvOS! It's more visually appealing and less ad-prone than the Roku interface, and the TV app is still probably the best attempt anyone has made to gather shows from multiple TV apps into one place (even if it's spoiled by some content providers' refusal to play ball). Apple doesn't make another modern operating system that still runs on things made in 2015, but the 1080p 4th-generation Apple TV is still trundling along with its iPhone 6-era Apple A8 processor. I'm still using the first-generation Apple TV 4K from 2017, and aside from replacing the bad old remote with the somewhat superior new one, I have felt zero need or desire to replace it. But the fact that I've noticed a 20 percent increase in icon density, more than any other feature Apple has introduced in the last five or six years, says something about how far Apple has lowered its ambitions for this third leg of the Apple TV's journey. Even the other noteworthy, non-icon-based improvements in tvOS 17 emphasize its existence as an appendage within Apple's ecosystem. The 4K models now support FaceTime, but only with a compatible iPhone or iPad paired (the Apple TV doesn't have the port you'd need for a USB webcam, even if you wanted to add one). And your phone can now home in on a lost remote, rather than making you dig frantically through the couch cushions. Apple's plans for the Apple TV used to be bigger than this.

“The future of TV is apps”

"The future of TV is apps," enthused Apple CEO Tim Cook in 2015 when the company announced that it would be relaunching the Apple TV as a full-fledged platform complete with App Store. The previous-generation Apple TV had already used the same chips Apple was shipping in iPhones and iPads, but the new Apple TV and tvOS would leverage the power of an A8 chip plus the iPhone's strong third-party app ecosystem to go beyond mere video streaming. Cook and Apple services chief Eddy Cue went through a litany of different types of apps during that unveiling: there would be console quality 3D games, including a new Guitar Hero title; fitness apps, comic book apps, real estate apps like Airbnb and Zillow, and shopping apps like Gilt all joined a familiar litany of TV and sports apps. Most of these apps and app categories still exist on Apple TV today (except for Gilt, Gilt is gone). And the health of the games ecosystem and the apps on the App Store's top charts suggest I'm not alone in that. 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.)

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.