Over its lifetime, Google’s Android TV has seen two core designs that the company has built on top of that. Google TV will replace Android TV next year, but now Google is transferring much of the experience to the current hardware. The Android TV home screen is updated with new personalized recommendations, a ‘Discover’ tab, and more.
Starting today and the next few weeks, Android TV devices will see an update on the home screen, offering an experience much closer to what is seen on Google TV. This is not an exact copy, but the similarities are clear.
Update 2/11: While the update officially started on February 3rd, we are finally starting to see a meaningful implementation from today. Updates to Android TV Home and Core Services have been implemented to announce the changes, but it appears that there is still a server component. My JBL switch bar was updated about 25 minutes after loading both updates, by our Kyle Bradshaw reported that the same change did not appear on his test device. A user in France informed us that he also saw the change today.
The biggest change here is that the Android TV home screen, just like Google TV, gets three tabs: Home, Discover and Apps. The main homepage (seen above) works much like what Android TV already offers. It shows the sponsored row at the top with “Favorite programs” and “Play next” below. From there, you will have rows of content from apps installed on your Android TV.
Android TV also gets a new ‘Discover’ tab, which is completely new to the experience. This tab is most reminiscent of Google TV. Like the “For You” tab on those devices, it contains movies and TV shows that are popular on Google Search, as well as personalized recommendations. As far as we can see, the “Watchlist” feature that makes Google TV so good is nowhere to be seen here. Finally, there is an app tab, which shows all installed apps as well as a link to the Google Play Store.
Google says that this redesigned home screen will follow in the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany and France, with more countries.
This comes at an interesting time, as Google said earlier that the goal is to switch the current Android TV hardware to the Google TV UI over time. Still, Google has previously teased that “some features” of the new UI would be transferred to Android TV, and that seems to be the fulfillment of the promise. In a way, it also serves as a stopover for the TVs and set-top boxes that will not be updated to the Google TV UI as a whole.
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