@gruber it feels like that deal you found late night at the Wal-Mart when your date needed to pick up groceries. Solid value, instant regret.

@gruber and has the worst time scrubbing experience ever shipped

@gruber Why it pauses when you toggle subtitles is a mystery. And that goofy expanding featured list is like a tech demo that accidently shipped. You also can’t forward or rewind often, but I guess that’s a minor feature for a video player

@gruber Amazon has absolutely zero taste.

@gruber And it has the worst video player ever created

@gruber maybe Amazon can come up with some good designs when they can keep an employee there for more than 2 months

@gruber They’ve also curiously withheld Dolby Vision from the Apple TV app with no explanation. https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1662969021

@gruber the McDonald’s app on iOS gives a similar UX

@gruber It looks the most like a thrown-together web player.

@gruber Amazon sucks at UIs. None of theirs are minimally good.

@gruber As @atpfm in some recent episode mentioned - almost all streaming clients are awful in usability. An awful look completes the awful feel. Kicking 3rd party devs won’t push competition for the best experience.

@gruber How is it that no streaming service has stolen this feature?

@gruber that is true.

@gruber I just was using it tonight to watch Top Gun - while the X-ray stuff is cool, anytime apps use something other than the native player it never works right. Fast forward/rewind is terrible.

@gruber and it feels just as bad as it looks. I can’t imagine anyone with a design background had anything to do with that app.

@gruber But I’ll give it one major credit: it puts “Continue watching” right at the top…

@gruber I had always assumed the Prime app’s Android and Google TV awfulness was due to them writing to the Amazon Appstore first. It’s somehow comforting to hear they were just going for crap-parity.

@gruber @pschiller I’d like have a cheat sheet slide-up on the TV App where I can see all the character names along with a portrait shot. Shows are complex these days and it’s hard to keep track of who is who when someone is referenced.

@gruber x-ray is super cool, but the player is such utter garbage I’m loathe to use it. If they would just use the native player, it would be the best streaming app.

@gruber they should adopt the native player and give us all a cup of ice water

@gruber 100% agree. on an OLED TV the overlay in the play/pause HUD looks awful and I can’t imagine they gave it much thought because for the longest period the app opened and gave me an error for about a month and a half. the only way to get it to work was to press the back button several times and pray to bezos that it’d work. no matter how many times i deleted and reinstalled it. really poor QA imo

@gruber that’s because they’re all web apps. There isn’t a single Amazon app that feels native. Not one.

@gruber pretty sure it’s a web app 👎

@gruber It doesn’t even render the UI in 4K when browsing the menu, too.

@gruber 5+ years ago I refused to watch anything Prime because the UI was so bad. Shocking it’s still bad so many years later.

@gruber the automatically expanding cards when you pause for just too long when scrolling is super annoying. And they don’t even show more information.

@gruber full ack, it looks like their shopping app, terrible design and unintuitive

@gruber sadly the Apple TV app still doesn't support Dolby Vision. I have to use my TVs app to watch Amazon shows in the best quality.

@gruber I always feel the same about the software on the Kindle. Utility:polish ratio is huge.

@gruber Even the shade of blue in the app icon looks cheap. As though they actively sought out cheapness.

@gruber they’re like the Generic product look from a dollar store honestly. It’s so ugly.

@gruber As everything at Amazon. Their shopping experience feels outdated.

@gruber oh the Amazon Design System™

@gruber it’s the only tvOS app I can think of that doesn’t even support the tvOS physics with tiles, I mean even French tv replay apps do. It feels like you’re dual booting into a 2007 HD player interface.

@gruber I’ll deal with the crappy UI if they’d fix their terrible encodes. Horrible artifacting, black crushing, colour pops (especially on faces). It’s bad-bad, especially on their original 4K content.

@gruber This is only because you don't live in the UK and have not had the pleasure of using NowTV, the streaming platform for Murdoch's Sky which gets all the HBO series. It's everything you'd expect a Murdoch streaming platform to be.

@gruber imho their music app is even worse. I tried using it for some of the podcasts I listen to because they’re without ads on there, and I’d rather deal with ads in my regular (lovely) app from @marcoarment than that garbage. I can’t even list all the problems with it without running out of characters.

@gruber it’s been a while since I last used it, but so little content had subtitles it made watching anything late at night impossible. I hope they fixed that between then and now.

@gruber the new as of a few month ago look a lot better that their previous one…

@gruber I wish X-ray worked with a companion app on your phone so you don’t need to pause for this info.

@gruber I’m annoyed by some UI decisions in almost all of the streaming apps these days… but agree Amazon’s is just terrible.

@gruber Oh have you had the pleasure of skipping back in a scene a few minutes to rewatch—only to have playback trouble so badly you have to restart the app? Infuriating every time I skipped back during The Peripheral because I couldn’t understand the dialog. Which is also infuriating.