Benjamin Mayo:
The Library may share the same tab bar as the other buttons in the TV app but they are otherwise disconnected. It’s like having two separate apps rolled into one, each with their own UI components and each operating on a different set of data. It’s like having two people living in the same house that do not talk to each other. For the Library tab, Apple essentially took the old iOS Videos app and transposed it as one screen inside of TV.
They didn’t modernise it all, and its age shows through.
And:
Everything is just very disjointed, both in concept and in their underlying implementations. A better TV app would have everything holistically driven by the same shared data source. You should be able to add any show to your library; it shouldn’t matter if that show is backed by a physical file on disk or not. The Apple Music app does a much better job at unifying the deprecated iTunes Store and the modern subscription-based experience.
Couldn’t agree more. I spend a fair amount of my TV watching experience in the Apple TV ecosystem. I would be more than happy to live in the TV app, consume all my content from that one focused source. But as is, things are just too confusing. Drives me to the individual apps, with their myriad ways of doing things. Confusing switching contexts, too. I’d love a rewrite.