If you haven’t already, please read my previous posts regarding iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS 14. 

Every year at WWDC, you can guarantee at least 4 things. That Apple will announce changes being made to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS. Less certain, and with decreasing frequency, is any talk at all of tvOS. In its place, Apple has been increasing it’s focus on the home and how their technology and platform is going to make it easier to setup and use your smart home accessories and keep it secure. While this is an encouraging thing for Apple to be keeping track of and investing in, they also need to keep some focus on the Apple TV itself and making it better. This is why I don’t want to ignore tvOS the way Apple does. The Apple TV is unique in that it doses’t need features to get users to do more things with it, it needs features to make accessing your content and services easier than ever. 

1. Improved Multiuser Support- Starting with tvOS 13, Apple added multiuser support to the Apple TV with the goal of keeping family members content and services more separate. However, there are very few apps I find that support this feature. Instead, apps keep users content separate by having their own account based system in place but that doesn’t extend to the OS level. So users content still regularly gets mixed up. In an App Store rule change beginning in tvOS 17, Apple should require developers who connect to TV app or developers who have a user select screen in their app to plug-in to Multiuser API. 

2. Kid Profiles- In a related point to the above, users in a Family Sharing group who have users marked as kids should have special profiles that can be managed by an adult user who can turn on extra options and filters to keep the content kids can watch or access age appropriate. 

3. Screen Time support- Also related to the point above, it’d be great if Apple Brough over Screen Time to the Apple TV. App Limits and time spent on Apple TV are included in Screen Time metrics on other devices but exclude Apple TV. This means if a user maxes out their time on an app like YouTube on their iPad, they can go to the Apple TV and keep watching there with no penalty to way to track it. 

4. Passcode Options for User Profiles- Related to the couple points above, you don’t want kids swapping to adult profiles to get around restrictions or if you live in a dorm and share your Apple TV with friends rather than family, you don’t want a friend to mess up your account. So it’d be great if users could add a simple passcode to their profile so you can’t swap to them without knowing the passcode. It’d be great if every time the Apple TV woke up from sleep it would ask who is using the Apple TV and prompt them to use their profile. 

5. Faster UI animations- the Apple TV suffers from a problem that the Apple Watch had for several years which is the speed of animations. It feels like it takes 1-2 seconds from the time you click a button on the Siri Remote for the screen to reflect the action you wanted to take. If animation speed was cut in half, it’d go a long way to making the device feel a lot nicer and getting users to their content quicker. 

7. Apple News app- Let me be clear, I’m not saying you should be able to read news stories on your Apple TV. That would be hell. What I am saying is bring the Apple News app to the Apple TV so people can listen to their News+ Audio Stories and watch video from News app partners.

8. Weather app- This would also be great app to bring to the Apple TV. To see weather radar in full screen along with weather trends for the entire day. In tvOS 15 and earlier, there was a really neat Weather interface you could get to by talking with Siri, so I really just want Apple to pull that out and make it a full, separate app.

9. Apple Books app- Let me be clear here too, I’m not saying you should be able to read full books on your Apple TV. That would also be hell. What I am saying is you should be able to listen to and browse for and purchase Audiobooks on the Apple TV just like you can movies or podcasts. This would give people even more options for enjoying their audiobooks and increase potential revenue for purchases of audiobooks.