Welcome to Android 5 years ago.

This is how Google does things. Light initial investment, see if product takes off naturally. If it does, they double down and invest more into it. If it doesn't, they kill it off, make some adjustments, rebrand and relaunch.

The nice thing with Android TV is that it's able to build off the success of Android. The Android ecosystem already exists, the devs and apps already exist. So it's not as dire a situation as Android was 5 years ago.

Additionally, a bunch of TV oems have adopted Android TV for their models this year. I expect AndroidTV to be the defacto TV OS within a few years, same as phones and regular Android. It will help alleviate costs associated with developing an OS and apps for TVs, allowing larger profit margins for TV oems. Unfortunately, early adopters of the shield, nexus player and other Android TVs will need to wait a bit longer.

It's a chicken/egg situation with Google taking a very low investment approach. It's not ideal by any means, but it's par for the course with Google.

True. Until Google somehow challenges developers to create apps for Android TV nothing will change.

I don't get it. One team of a few people could overturn the situation.

I still am baffled that the Android tv youtube isn't 60fps. This is how you know you are a half assed experiment. It's very frustrating, my shield tv could be used so much more powerfully.

What if someone tried putting some phone version of this on their Android tv. Any luck with going that direction if Google themselves are too busy NOT caring about android tv?

What apps specifically are you missing?

For me, WatchESPN is the only app that I'm missing.

Kodi, Emulators, Netflix, Youtube, Google Music, MLB.tv, CBS Sports are all there.

Did you open the Youtube app on the ATV? It's absolute shit. That's at least one advantage we have over the ATV.

I'm rather embedded in the Android TV ecosystem, and there's a number of apps already available and more continuing to be published. It may not be as much as you may like, but it does seem to be growing at an ever faster rate.

The exclusive apps are frustrating, especially when there is not a good reason like Amazon.

However this will likely not be a dying product. They're competing directly with Apple now and competing app ecosystems will likely drive future growth.

Plus, Google is interested in TV in general. They are interested in bundling it with their IoT products as well as cable integration now that the FCC is standardizing cable.

With a lot of android apps, it can't even be that hard.

I was excited to play through some of the re released final fantasy games. They were originally made with a controller in mind and are expensive so i assumed they would be androidTV compatible, nope.

I have had my Nexus player for just under a month now, and I'm just leaning towards setting it up for kodi full time... There is hardly any customisation with the leanback launcher, and I have had nothing but issues trying to incorporate tvheadend streams into live channels where as I had kodi setup within minutes

A couple months ago I e-mailed the developers of a bunch of apps I would like to see on androidTV and the results were not encouraging

https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidTV/comments/3x4y1n/i_emailed_a_15_tv_network_app_developers_to_ask/

I never heard back from anyone else after my initial update.

Believe it or not, I do have a tv with more than one input the roku does everything I want. I really like the android tv experience... It just doesn't have the apps I use. So that sucks.

What they need is a killer app. If there is an app that will drive device sales, the apps will come. Even Apple hasn't had luck with that.

My opinion is that gaming is that app. Nvidia is doing great things with the shield, but not quite enough. Google should put all their effort into courting Nintendo. Imagine if they started releasing games for Android TV. Sales would go through the roof, and it would coax developers to port their apps.

I could care less about a million apps that are of no use. The only app that is missing for me is Watch ESPN. The major app's are all there with the exception of Amazon. Most people with smart TV's have a native Amazon app so it doesn't matter as much.

You guys should try CetusPlay on Google Play. Thanks so much for the developer team to release this app for android TV.

How can this post have 0 points? It's the main reason my shield is on a shelf and I use my roku primarily. I mean... It doesn't even have watch espn (or watch disney jr) and you can't cast either one. I know that's on the developers, but are they even trying?

Don't you guys know how to sideload apps? Literally every one of the millions of Android apps can be installed on the Android TV. From my experience, 90% of them work just fine (the only exception being portrait-only-oriented apps)