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 launching in the coming 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.
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’ll have rows full of app 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. Just like the “For you” tab on these devices, what you find 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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