HBO Max to completely overhaul the Apple TV Buggy app by the end of the year

HBO Max will release a completely rebuilt Apple TV app by the end of the year to overcome various issues users have with the current version, according to a new report.

Shortly after Warnermedia pulled its HBO Max offering from Apple TV channels in May, a subsequently released update to its tvOS app essentially broke several features of the service.

In June, HBO Max ditched the native tvOS video player in favor of a custom video player, which introduced issues of fast forwarding and rewinding video in the app.

Recognizing its mistake, HBO quickly restored the native user interface to the tvOS video player. However, playback control issues remained, while users continued to report other issues related to captions and audio description.

According to HBO Max executives who spoke to Vulture, these remaining errors should be fixed for all Apple TV users “within days”, while subscribers can expect a completely new application rollout to match the needs of the current service.

“We will be replacing every smart TV app over the next four or five months,” said an anonymous director of WarnerMedia. Apple TV customers will likely have to wait until the end of the year for the new app to appear, and a revamp of the mobile and web apps is slated for early 2022.

According to the report, the problems started when the company launched a new ad-supported $ 10 tier and extended its application to 39 new countries in June. Embedding ads into what was an ad-free platform required the introduction of a whole new layer of application coding, and that’s when the widely reported bugs were established.

WarnerMedia also admitted that the current HBO Max app was not built from scratch and runs on a modernized version of the old HBO Go and HBO Now services, which were designed for a very different product. Hence the decision to start from scratch with a brand new app, which has been in the works for at least the end of last year.