Aamir Siddiqui / Android Authority
TL;DR Android TV currently offers a Discover tab for getting recommendations and building your watchlist.
A new update to the system launcher suggests that Google’s planning to drop Discover and move your watchlist to the Home tab.
Confusingly, Google’s messaging in the app suggest that this change was supposed to take place in July.
What does your usage of Android TV look like? Google’s big-screen entertainment platform certainly tries to act as a hub that not just organizes all your streaming options in one place, but helps steer you in the direction of what you might want to check out next. Are you taking advantage of that, though, checking in on the Discover tab to get some recommendations from Google? Or are you more likely to dive right in to your favorite streaming app itself, and learn about what’s new on a service-by-service basis?
We wonder just how many users fall into that latter camp — and Google probably has been too, as the company seems to be getting ready to kill off Discover as we know it.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
At least, Google sure looks like it was getting ready to put an end to the Discover tab in Android TV. We’re just a little less than sure if that plan is still in motion.
Looking over the changes in Google’s 7.1.7-787904429-f update for the Android TV Home app — basically the Android TV launcher that provides the base UI — we’ve identified some new text strings that reference plans to remove Discover:
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