Throughout its life, Google’s Android TV has seen two main designs that the company has built on them. Google TV is set to replace what Android TV established over the next year, but now Google is bringing much of that experience to today’s hardware. The Android TV home screen is being updated with new personalized recommendations, a “Discover” tab and more.
Starting today and rolling out over the next few weeks, Android TV devices will see an update to the home screen, which offers a much closer experience than seen on Google TV. It is not an exact copy, but the similarities are obvious.
Update 2/11: Although the update officially launched on February 3, we are finally starting to see a significant release starting today. Updates for Android TV Home and Core Services released to deliver the changes, but it looks like there’s still a server-side component as well. My JBL link bar updated about 25 minutes after both updates were sideloaded, by our Kyle Bradshaw reported that the same change did not appear on his test device. A user in France too notified us that he also saw the change today.
The biggest change here is that, like Google TV, the Android TV home screen now has three tabs – Home, Discover and Apps. The main home tab (seen above) works very similar to what Android TV already offers. It shows the sponsored line at the top with “Favorite apps” and “Play Next” below. From there, you will have rows full of application content installed on your Android TV.
Android TV also gets a new “Discover” tab, which is totally new to the experience. This tab is the one that most resembles Google TV. As well as the “For you” tab on these devices, what is found here includes movies and TV shows that are hot on Google Search, as well as personalized recommendations. As far as we can tell, however, the “Watchlist” feature that makes Google TV so good is nowhere to be seen here. Finally, there is an application tab, which shows all installed applications, as well as a link to the Google Play Store.
Google says that this redesigned home screen will launch in the United States, as well as in Australia, Canada, Germany and France, with more countries to follow.
This comes at an interesting time, as Google said earlier that the goal is to transition from the current Android TV hardware to the Google TV user interface over time. Still, Google had already provoked that “some features” of the new UI would be transported back to Android TV and it seems that this is the fulfillment of that promise. In a way, this also acts as a stopgap for TVs and set-top boxes that will not be upgraded to the Google TV UI as a whole.
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