The Apple TV App Is Now Available on Android

Apple Newsroom:

The Apple TV app is now available to download from Google Play on Android mobile devices — including phones, tablets, and foldables — offering Android users access to hit, award-winning Apple Original series and films on Apple TV+, along with MLS Season Pass, the home of Major League Soccer.

Available around the world, the Apple TV app for Android was built from the ground up to deliver Android users a familiar and intuitive interface. Android users can subscribe to Apple TV+ and MLS Season Pass using their Google Play account on Android mobile and Google TV devices. Apple TV+ also offers a seven-day free trial.

The Apple TV app on Android includes key features like Continue Watching to pick up where a user left off across all their devices, and Watchlist to keep track of everything they want to watch in the future. The app streams seamlessly over Wi-Fi or a cellular connection, and includes the ability to download to watch offline.

One thing that’s funny about this press release is that no one from Apple is quoted in it. Not just not Eddy Cue, but no one, not even a lieutenant under Cue. The second-paragraph quotes from executives are where these press releases contain their superlatives proclaiming how awesome the news is. E.g. last week’s announcement for the new Apple Invites app — the second paragraph is a quote from Brent Chiu-Watson, a senior director of product marketing. They didn’t want to include one of those sugary quotes saying how frigging awesome it is that there’s now an Apple TV app for Android, and that it works great and if you use an Android device you can still have a great Apple TV experience.

But the Apple TV app does seem frigging awesome, and it does seem like if you use an Android device you can now have a great Apple TV experience. Here’s Dan Seifert, longtime writer and editor for The Verge, who left for a position at Google as “product critic” a year ago:

thrilled to see Apple TV land on Android devices today!

it’s an excellent Android citizen too:

themeable app icon: ✅
PIP support: ✅
offline downloads: ✅
foldable posture support: ✅

(Also perhaps ever so slightly interesting that in its announcement, Apple positioned “foldables” as an entirely separate third category from phones and tablets. I wouldn’t make a big deal of that — I’m not sure how else they could mention that the app supports “foldable posture”.)

I’m most curious about why it took so long for this to happen. Apple Music launched (albeit as a beta) for Android almost 10 years ago. (Eddy Cue then: “The menus will look like Android, you know the little hamburger they use on the top. It’ll definitely feel very much like an Android app.”) And, what I think is a related question as to why this took so long: Is Google taking its usual Play Store cut from subscriptions to TV+ made in the app?

★ Wednesday, 12 February 2025