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.
Apple is incompetent at writing software for anything but their own devices. iCloud Web is also a disaster for example, and the old iTunes for Windows is infamous for being a buggy mess. Though I have to say they did a good job with the new web Apple Maps.
I always thought this was intentional. Apple TV doesn’t make them money, but it’s a gateway drug for you to completely move over to their ecosystem
They aren’t incompetent, they want people to think “wow this is horrible, it must be my windows PC - I need to buy a MacBook!”
Too bad, it makes me think “wow this is horrible, if they are this bad at developing a simple app I don’t want to find out how bad they would be at developing and maintaining a whole OS…”
Which is funny. I get MLS season pass with my season ticket. I had to jump through so many hoops just to ACTIVATE this free thing. You can’t just visit a website. You need an account with a credit card. You either use an Apple device or iTunes. You can’t use their app on any platform (even the one youre going to use to watch it) to activate. Big thing is you cant even get iTunes on Linux without a huge hassle and wine. This isn’t even getting into that the android mobile app wasn’t even released till this year, like three years in.
The whole experience convinced me to NEVER buy anything Apple.
It is definitely a stupid strategy. I have a large iTunes library, and when they released the apple music app for windows a few years ago I tried switching over. Somehow the new app was even worse than iTunes, so I had to figure out how to switch everything back. At the same time I tried installing the iCloud app for PC - that may be literally the worst piece of software I have had the displeasure of using. It installed a bunch of services on my PC, added itself to the file explorer, and then failed to let me log into my account. That was also fun to figure out how to completely remove.
Maybe it is working again now… I have no real desire to test it again. Clearly they released these applications (after years of complaints) knowing that they weren’t functional, or possibly without any testing whatsoever. Overall it is a laughable effort from a company with a budget as large as Apple’s.