I watched some of Apple’s recent shows using…different methods than the official app and I believe they’re making some of the best content out there, currently. Shows like Severance and For All Mankind are masterpieces and they give me the SciFi fix I desperately needed.

So I’ve decided to bite the bullet and get a subscription - after all, you should support the creators you’re really invested in, right?

Watching content on their platform is so painful - it’s one of the worst experiences I ever had. If you want to watch the shows in a browser, you need to use Microsoft Edge on Windows because that’s the only browser which comes with Playwright DRM - and it only works if you have a HDCP 2.2-capable screen. If you don’t have that, the content gets served in 480p with a low bitrate. Might as well just put in a VHS at this point.

There’s another alternative: The official Windows 11 app you can get from the store. It is indeed capable of serving you UHD streams…if it wants to. All episodes that are age-rated to 16+ currently don’t work, because they forgot to implement an age verification mechanism and pressing play doesn’t do anything at all. According to their forums, that even seems to happen on MacOS in some cases, so they really messed up the most important thing of their own streaming platform: Pressing Play to watch an episode.

Even if you’re lucky and you’re watching a show that isn’t age-restricted, they serve the content in the language your Apple account has been set to when you’ve created it by default. So every time you open an episode, you have to start it and switch the audio to English. If you go to your account settings to change the language it tells you that your subscription needs to end before you can do that. So you have to wait four weeks or a whole year to change the default language, depending on the subscription model.

Adding to that, sometimes the video streams just freeze, the audio doesn’t play at all or the app straightup crashes in the middle of a stream.

I have rarely seen a platform messing up the user experience this badly. It’s as if Apple doesn’t even want you to watch their own content. I’ve decided to not renew my subscription and procure the episodes from other sources. I wanted to give you money, Apple. But you fucked up.

  • RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    I know this isnt what you want to hear, but it’s actually one of the better apps on my smart tv. It works pretty smoothly, and video seeking (fast forward/rewind) actually works well, which is a main criteria for me. The Max app, on the other hand, is dog shit.

    • wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      It used to be the worst app because Netflix was so damn good. Then Netflix took a shit all over their user experience and jacked prices to the tits so we cancelled them. And HBO got bought by Time Warner who is actively antagonistic towards streaming because the CEO just looks at their entire catalog as a tax writeoff - so the max app is fucking dreadful.

      Then Apple decided to make things suck less and they succeeded. The one thing they screwed up is there is no way to disable that obnoxious auto-play bullshit at the end of each episode. All of the other apps are now so bad that we exclusively subscribe through the appletv app. My wife likes giving money to paramount for some reason - but at least if we do it through the apple app there are no ads.