WWDC 2019 Keynote Impressions – tvOS

It’s that time of the year again, Apple announces a lot of new stuff, there are millions of hot takes on the Internet (including mines) and nobody is satisfied. This year though, there was so much for everyone it’s hard to write one summary. During the presentation I’ve made bullet list of the most interesting things and it is miles long. I will try to mention only the things that matter the most to me.

I will focus today on the very beginning of the Keynote and mostly on tvOS.

The video from the beginning showing the struggle of the developers, was very believable and not only applicable to the developers. Comparing to the previous years it was very “safe”, but not worse because of that.

I still can’t find the reason to buy pretty expensive Apple TV. But Apple tries more and more to give me that reason. Most of the changes to the tvOS are similar to the changes to other operating systems. They showed the TV+ service and Apple Arcade. What made me believe a bit more into the idea was the support for DualShock and Xbox One controllers. This is pretty great, as I have one and I believe there will be some interesting games I would want to play on Apple TV. The segment was very fast paced (like almost all of the keynote), but I thought in the room fool of developers and such a full packed keynote, it was not very fitting to spend the time on the trailer for the new TV show. Although now, when I hear or read opinions – at least the press loved it. There was also a moment when Tim Cook was showing some “amazing” feature and waited for the applause, but there was silence, it felt like a Samsung conference, but it got only better and better after that.

Right now on the Apple website there are previews of everything they showed in the keynote – iOS, iPad OS, watchOS and macOS, but nothing about tvOS. This seems very telling. There were almost no changes to the OS itself, mostly the presentation about the services that were added on top.