Hands-On Apple 247: The Apple TV App

0:00Alright, open the Apple TV app on your iPhone right now and scroll past the big featured poster at the top. Below the row of things you've already started, there's a row called Watch List. And if you're like most people, either you didn't know you had one or the show you swear you saved, isn't in it. That isn't carelessness on your part. Apple has renamed and relocated this list more than once. And it gave the app, the streaming service, and the black box under your TV the same three words. Today, we're untangling the Apple TV app. What the rows actually mean? How to feed it to your other streaming subscriptions? And how to stop it from auto-playing something you didn't ask for. Stay tuned for this episode of Hands on Apple. This episode is brought to you by OutSystems, the leading agentic systems platform. OutSystems is helping their customers modernize operations by enabling them to build, modernize, and operate enterprise systems,

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2:05That's OutSystems.com slashtwit. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Toys. Hello and welcome to Hands-On Apple. I am Mikeus Argentin. Today we are taking a look at the Apple TV app because, depending on what device you're on, things can get a little confusing. So let's talk about what this means. Before anything else works, before any of it actually functions the way that you expect, it's important that you understand how each of these tools, depending on which device you're on, actually function. And what they all mean. So first and foremost, depending on the device you have, you may have an Apple TV 4K, or you may have another Apple TV.

3:06And on that box called the Apple TV 4K or Apple TV is an app called Apple TV app. And here's the thing. The streaming service is now called Apple TV as well because Apple dropped that plus, that used to be called Apple TV plus, from the Apple TV on November 3rd of 2025. So honestly, that removed the last easy way to tell the service apart from everything else, wearing that exact same name. And what's great, but also can be a little confusing as well, is that the app comes pre-installed on your iPhone, on your iPad, on your Mac, on your Apple TV 4K, and on your Apple Vision Pro. But it's not just there because it also runs on Samsung televisions, LG televisions, Sony televisions, Vizio Smart televisions, Roku televisions, Amazon Fire TV, PlayStation, Xbox, Windows, and also since February of 2025, it also runs on Android.

4:11Yeah, it's everywhere. Everything that you would expect to have an Apple TV, you can find on all these devices. And there's another thing to understand. Everything personal in the app follows your Apple TV account. It's not the hardware that's holding on to all of the personalization. It's the account. So that means that signing in on a friend's TV is going to bring that same watch list and watch progress with it when you sign in. Oh, and by the way, I have covered the Apple TV a little bit before. I talked about the ability for your phone to be used as a means to match color balance between the television and the Apple TV itself. So if you check out episode 194, you can learn more about that. Now, before we dig into how things have changed over the course of Apple TV and TVOS, we're going to take a quick break so I can tell you about our sponsor for today's episode of

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7:20Delete Me today. And if you use that link, you'll also get a free year of social media protection for every seat you purchase. That's joindeleteme.com slash twit hyphen biz with a Z. Thank you so much to Delete Me for sponsoring this week's episode of Hands on Apple. All right, let's head back to the show. Now when it comes to the TV app, the Apple TV app, things have changed over time. So let's head in to iOS and take a look. Here we are on iOS. And as you can see, I've got the Apple TV app in front of me. And as I mentioned before, we've got a scroll down a little bit past that featured poster to see the continue watching screen. The row that Apple used to call the up next section, it's gone. It's now continue watching. These are the things that are already in progress. There's another place where things that are not already in progress are saved and it's separate. And here's the annoying

8:21thing about that. We got a scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and there we are watch list all the way down there at the bottom or near the bottom. It's very far away. It's the separate row for titles that are saved for later and depending on what Apple TV is serving you, it gets dropped there. How do you go about saving something? Well, let's tap on this remembering Dolly Parton section or we can see some of the apps that the apps, the shows the Dolly Parton has been a part of like the Dolly Partons mountain magic Christmas. Let's say we want to add that to our up next. That's no longer called up next. It's called Continue Watching and Watch List. So we tap on that and you can see there are three options. Go to movie, add to watch list and share movie. We're going to choose add to watch list and if we go back

9:22to our home screen, you'll see that it pops up in the watch list. In order to get it into continue watching, you actually have to play it and start watching it. So touching and holding on the poster on the iPhone or the iPad and tapping to add to watch list is how you go about doing that. Of course, pressing and holding the clickpad on the Apple TV remote, the Siri remote, and then selecting add to watch list is how you do it on the Apple TV. If you don't want something in your watch list or in your up next, simply tapping and holding on that item in either of those and choosing remove from watch list or remove from continue watching will allow it to go away. Here's the kind of catch though. Things that are added to the watch list also do appear and continue watching once you start watching them. So if you, well, and here it is as well, the continue watching section is showing the Dolly Parton's Mountain Magic Christmas. So the only difference is

10:31that it shows down at the bottom in watch list, meaning that you have not begun watching it yet. Whereas the other content that I have on here that I have started watching shows the progress of the episode or movie. It gets a little confusing and this kind of overlap between the two does make it a little bit unclear what you're meant to do. So in order to get it to the next stage, of course, finishing an episode will drop the next one in that continue watching section if you're watching a show. And so that row sometimes fills up with stuff that you may be going, where, where did that come from? I had no idea that I was watching that. And both rows, and remember before when I said that when you log in with your Apple account, that makes a difference on what's showing up. That's because both rows sink to every device that signed into the same Apple account. So your iPhone, your iPad, your Mac, your Apple TV 4K,

11:32your Vision Pro, and supported smart TVs, they all show the same content. It can be a little confusing how they go about showing that content because depending on the device, you may not have access to some of the apps. So I have found that Mac OS tends to be the place where the fewest apps and streaming services will show content. And frankly, the app is only as useful as the services that are connected to it. So if we go to the home page, as you can see, we are here, where we have continue watching at the top. We can scroll down, not as far as watch list, to this section that is marked with channels and apps. This section shows you the different apps and channels built into the Apple TV, Disney Plus HBO Max. And this, by the way, this is a very long section. So first and

12:33foremost, the options that are available based on the subscriptions that you have will appear at the beginning. So Disney Plus HBO Max NBC, which is part of peacock, Paramount Plus, PBS, peacock, prime video, those are all places where I am signed in. What comes after are the places where I'm not signed in like MGM Plus and Hulu and brickbox and a corn TV and adult swim, AMC, animal planet BBC America, BBC select BFI player and on and on and on. And when I say on and on and on, I mean that it keeps going. Own the Oprah network is the last one there. You've got TNT, you've got CW, you've got Telomundo, you've got stars and shutter and screen picks and Saigo and Red Bull TV. Again, the list continues on and on and on and on. And here's the thing, connected apps is its own

13:36sort of understanding because it's separate from the built-in channels that Apple offers where you can pay for a subscription to one of the services, the streaming services within the Apple TV app, whereas connected apps are third party apps that can also serve content into the Apple TV. So outside shows can appear into continue watching without them. The app only knows about Apple's own catalog and purchases. On Apple TV, those connections live in settings, apps, TV, and these are underconnected to TV. So we can take a look at some of the settings that are available to us. If we tap in the top right corner, if we're on the home screen, we tap in the top right corner on the avatar here. It brings up your Apple account information and you'll notice there's a section called connected apps. This shows you the different apps that I have installed or have installed at some point that are connected. AMC Animal Planet, BBC America, HBO Max, Hulu, Paramount Plus, PBS

14:42video, these different apps I've signed into at different times and so they are providing information to the Apple TV and making it available to me to watch there. In the US, the supported list, it's very long. It includes Disney Plus and Hulu and some of these other options. But there's one limit that's very important to understand, something that's very frustrating. Netflix of all places has never participated in the connected apps option. So you have to watch Netflix stuff via the Netflix app directly and scroll through and do your searches that way. Understandable. But here's the thing. Here's the annoying thing. Netflix appeared briefly in February of last year. And then people celebrated and then Netflix said, oh, that was a mistake. It was very frustrating. YouTube and YouTube TV, they also are not available to you. But they've

15:43never been available. So it's understandable that they continue to not be there. Apple's own list of supported apps is country by country. So a service that connects in the US may not connect to broad. That's something to bear in mind. And Apple TV channels that you buy inside the app and separate apps installed from the app store, they will sit side by side in that same row. So you can kind of lose track of what's actually being billed and it's part of the reason why I recommend to people who have trouble keeping track of that to do as much as you can as an Apple TV channel, particularly because it means that if you log in on a Samsung TV or a Roku or another one of these devices, you are able to log in and access your Apple TV channels on those devices. So you don't have to rely on that smart TV having an app for one of those third party options. Let's talk about some of the switches that you may want to flip, some of the settings that you

16:46may want to change. Be it auto play, spoilers, your history, your watch history, it's all over the place. And the first part starts with auto play because auto play is actually inside the app. It's not in the settings. In order to access it, you tap home, you tap your face in the top left hand corner or top right hand corner. And then you look for the playback option and you'll see there are a couple of things here. First, play next episode. What that does is that at the end of an episode of a series, it will automatically play the next one. But the second one is a little bit different. After a series finishes or a movie finishes or a sporting event finishes, it can automatically play content that is recommended for you based on your previous watching experience. If you don't like that, turn it off. I like to have play next episode turned on. I like to have play a recommendation turned off because I have found that the recommendations are not very good for me. You also have the

17:53ability to view sports scores within the app. Underneath the settings, which we accessed by tapping on our face in the top right corner or whatever you happen to have there as your Apple account in the top right corner, we choose sports in the settings and you turn on sync my sports upon doing so. Apple says sports, leagues, teams and athletes you follow will sync across Apple news, Apple TV and other Apple apps. I don't follow sports and so I do not have that in my options. Now, that's not the only set of controls that you have when it comes to your Apple TV app. You can also decide whether you want play history to be a part of the experience. If we again tap in the top right corner on our avatar and we choose Apple TV settings, you are presented with a list of controls,

18:56including streaming options and download options and automatic downloads and audio. And one of the options here is under the device preferences pane and use play history is here alongside show sports scores and it says allow TV shows and movies played on this device to influence for you recommendations and continue watching across your devices. So that means that if you have a device like a child's iPad, for example, that's watching a bunch of nonsense, you can turn it off on that device so that your child's favorite show does not influence the algorithm that is suggesting content to you. Very handy. Inside the app, you also have the ability to clear out the history. So if you are unhappy with how the content is displaying, you can use the clear history option,

19:58which we will go back into the app. We'll tap in the top right corner and we will look at, I think it's in pull. No, not in playback. It is in privacy and access. Here if we choose clear play history, then everything that you've watched on this device and other devices is cleared out and you can kind of start fresh. It clears every single signed in device and lets you rebuild your algorithm from there. You also have streaming and download quality in your settings. So if you have a low, if you have a limit on how much data you're able to download or if you have a limit on your bandwidth, this is a great way to decide how that content shows up for you. So in streaming options, I have you cellular data and under cellular, I have high quality set. You can also set it to automatic. Wi-Fi, high quality or data saver and then under download,

21:05whether or not cellular data is allowed and what languages are available as well. I like to have high quality turned on across the board because I happen to have a plan that has unlimited data. But if you have a limited data plan, then changing this might be good for you. There's a lot to explore when it comes to these settings within your Apple TV app. And again, this is an Apple TV app that is available in so many places. So setting these settings on a device that makes it easy to do so like your iPhone or your iPad or the Apple TV itself is a great way to make sure that everything is kind of locked in before you decide to log in on a third-party device. So here's my homework for you. Open the Apple TV app on whatever device gets the most use. Scroll on down to the channels in the apps row and check whether the streaming services already being paid for are actually connected. Connecting even do of them changes the

22:09continue watching row from a list of Apple's own shows into something that's actually worth glancing at. And while you're in there, go ahead and turn off play a recommendation because, as I said, I don't like the recommendations. And frankly, it is the setting that's most likely to start a show that nobody chose. Whereas if you have it set to play the next episode, that's a different story. Profiles, kids mode, and the more in-depth sports side of the app, we're not going to do that in this episode in order to keep it within this 25-minute package, 24-minute package. But that may be something that we look at in the future. If those are worth a follow-up and you would like to learn more about profiles and kids mode and the sports app, then say so in the clubs who it discord. I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode of Hands on Apple.

23:10It's always a pleasure to bring you this show. It's truly one of the highlights of my week. So be sure to tune in next week for another episode. And if you have questions, comments, concerns, or more HOA at twit.tv. And forgive me today for the shininess. My AC is broken. And I am sweating as I'm recording this episode of Hands on Apple. Goodbye, everybody. And I'll catch you again next week for another episode of Hands on Apple. If you're looking for more Apple coverage, can I invite you to check out Mac break weekly every Tuesday? They dig into everything happening with the iPhone, with iPad, with Mac, and so much more.