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Apple TV+ has some fantastic shows, and the quality of its content, both in terms of visuals and storytelling, is top-tier. But despite offering great titles, the platform isn’t quite hitting the success it deserves. According to 9to5Mac, Apple TV+ holds only a 7% market share in the U.S., which is surprising considering most of its shows are aimed at U.S. audiences. And given that the U.S. is a huge market for Apple products, this seems a bit off. For context, in Q4 2024, iPhones made up 65% of the smartphone market in the U.S., meaning more than half of the phones sold were Apple devices, as reported by Counterpoint. Owning an Apple device is pretty crucial if you want the best experience with Apple TV+, since on other platforms, video quality can often be as low as 480p or even 240p, and there’s no option to adjust it.
Until recently, Apple TV+ didn’t even have an app for Android smartphones and tablets, so Android users had to rely on a browser to watch content, and the experience was far from ideal. Even now, with the Android app available, it’s still pretty buggy. For starters, there’s no option to select video quality, so you’re often stuck with low resolution. Occasionally, a show just turns into a black screen, and the only fix is to uninstall and reinstall the app. Some devices don’t even let you change the language of the show you’re watching, and there are times when a show will freeze halfway through. These issues have popped up on a variety of devices, including the Xiaomi Pad 6, iQOO Z5, Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, and Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Plus. The app feels more like a progressive web app than a fully functional native one. Even when we tested it on laptops like the Acer Aspire 3 and MSI Modern 14, and on two desktop computers, we ran into similar problems as on Android devices.
On the Google Play Store, the Apple TV+ app holds a decent rating of 3.9. While that’s not exactly what we were expecting, it’s worth noting that amidst the negative reviews, there are also some very positive ones. This suggests that not all users are encountering the issues we’ve experienced.
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