A number of weeks in the past, Warner Bros. Discovery introduced that it could be rebooting the favored HBO Max service as simply “Max” to raised replicate the broader availability of content material stemming from its new partnership. With the addition of Discovery to the combination, it’s not nearly HBO anymore.
Max formally launched in the present day with a brand new set of cellular and good TV apps which were rebuilt from the bottom up. Whereas there’s rather a lot to love within the new apps, together with some important enhancements to offline downloads, it’s not all sunshine and roses for these within the Apple ecosystem.
Though HBO content material nonetheless will get middle stage, Max is chocked filled with different stuff, together with “Max Originals,” plus a choice of different Warner Bros. TV reveals and flicks, together with materials from the DC Universe, Cartoon Community, and Looney Tunes, to call just a few, plus Discovery model favorites such because the eponymous Discovery channel, plus HGTV, the Meals Community, TLC, and extra.
As nice as the brand new array of content material is, plainly Warner Bros. Discovery has determined to go down a much less fashionable highway with its tvOS app, creating an expertise that doesn’t combine into Apple’s set-top field practically in addition to the earlier HBO Max app.
Most importantly, Max has rolled its personal customized media participant moderately than utilizing the one constructed into tvOS, leaving viewers with out lots of the person interface components they’ve turn out to be accustomed to.
As an illustration, the navigation expertise is noticeably completely different. The jog-wheel mode of the Siri Distant doesn’t perform in any respect, so customers might want to swipe left or proper to clean by means of a present. There’s no Siri assist for skipping ahead or backward or adjusting to a particular place. This additionally extends to different Siri options like asking “What did he/she say” to rapidly skip again just a few seconds and quickly activate closed captioning.
Alongside the identical traces, there’s additionally no assist for system-wide accessibility shortcuts for doing issues like turning on closed captioning. Whereas Max reveals do assist captions, you’ll have to dig by means of the menus to toggle them on or off, which isn’t practically as fast and straightforward as utilizing this helpful accessibility shortcut in your Siri Distant.
What’s much more unlucky is that by abandoning the native tvOS participant, Max additionally loses assist for the system-wide accessibility options that make the Apple TV among the finest set-top packing containers available on the market for folks with disabilities.
As an illustration, the Apple TV Accessibility settings allow you to customise sizes, colours, and fonts for subtitles to make them simpler to learn. You can even set the Apple TV to dim flashing lights and cut back loud sounds. Apps that use the participant constructed into tvOS inherit all these options.
That is such an important set of options that even Netflix has gotten with this system, regardless of being one of many staunchest holdouts in supporting different Apple TV options similar to AirPlay and Apple’s TV app.
HBO Max and the Apple TV
What makes this even worse is that it’s not the primary time this has occurred. When HBO rebranded as HBO Max two years in the past, leaving the Apple TV Channels service within the course of, it launched a brand new model of the HBO Max app that switched to a customized participant, degrading the person expertise considerably.
Apple followers rapidly and vocally pushed again towards the change, leading to HBO Max head Andy Forssell apologizing on Twitter and saying the native participant could be making a return.
Lower than 24 hours after Forssell’s tweet, the corporate formally introduced it had “missed the mark” and launched an replace “restoring the native tvOS playback expertise” that customers “know and love.”
Sadly, although, it seems the corporate hasn’t discovered from that mistake. Perhaps it appears to suppose it will probably do higher with its personal customized participant this time, however the suggestions to this point reveals that it’s as soon as once more missed the mark by a large margin.
As a number of people have reported on Reddit, the customized participant doesn’t even correctly assist Dolby Imaginative and prescient or Dolby Atmos content material, regardless of the service having a wealth of films in these higher-quality codecs. Not surprisingly, Apple’s Match Dynamic Vary and Match Body Fee options don’t work both.
Whereas Max would have mechanically inherited all these options by embracing the native tvOS participant, Dolby Imaginative and prescient and Dolby Atmos are issues they may have — and may have — rolled into their customized participant in the event that they had been going to construct one in any respect.
In actual fact, the customized participant is so unhealthy that some have speculated that Max could have merely reverted to the one it constructed — and deserted — two years in the past.
Nonetheless, this time round, the brand new Max app has added one different important omission to the combination. Regardless of saying two years in the past that it remained dedicated to integrating with Apple’s TV app for surfacing and discovering content material and together with it within the unified “Up Subsequent” queue, the brand new Max seems to have taken the flawed web page out of Netflix’s e book, and chosen to go it by itself.
The underside line is that the brand new Max app for the Apple TV is a horrible regression in performance. The one glimmer of hope is that this can be nothing greater than a colossal blunder on the a part of Warner Bros. Discovery in launching the brand new app. The corporate hasn’t commented in any respect on any of those points, so there’s a chance that it might roll the native participant again in as a part of a future replace, very like it did in 2021.