Apple TV+ is available through the TV app on Apple devices, many smart TVs, PlayStation, Xbox, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, and other platforms. The service also offers a rudimentary web experience to access Apple original TV shows and movies through a web browser, available at tv.apple.com.
Development on the website has been excruciatingly slow. For instance, the Up Next watchlist only came to the web-app a few months ago. Today, it gains another basic feature that people naturally expect from a streaming app: the ability to search for shows by name.
Until today, there was no search functionality on tv.apple.com. The only way to find a particular show (that wasn’t in your Up Next list) was to scroll through the carousels on the homepage, often having to take several guesses at which category Apple had put the show in, and then select the title.
Many customers trying to use the web-app on a regular basis would resort to using Google to find what they wanted to watch, searching something like ‘ted lasso Apple TV’ to find the show page URL from there.
Thankfully, that silliness can now come to an end. A search bar is now available in the top-right of the tv.apple.com website. Unsurprisingly, you type in keywords and it comes back with results from the TV+ catalog that match your search query.
The quality of the TV app experience is sub-par in general, but the website has been lagging behind even that low bar. The addition of a search feature to the website helps close some of that gap, at least.
The website experience is important as it is currently the only way for TV+ subscribers with Android phones and tablets, and Windows PCs, to enjoy Apple’s content on their devices. To date, Apple has not announced plans to release native apps for those platforms.
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