Native app vs. Web app

[jasonb1 7]

The Android TV native app (Fire TV at least) seems lacking compared to the web UI:

1. List view missing (other views as well)

2. Performance problems with a large number of items. If I jump to letter "T" in the Android TV app, it hangs for a long time before I gave up, in the web UI, it jumps immediately.

3. Search is better (but web UI search still in need of big improvements).

Why not just wrap the web UI (maybe with some tweaks) into a Cordova app and save development time? Thanks.

 - Jason

P.S. Note that I launched the web UI on my Fire TV with the silk browser and it is kind of usable but not really easy due to the "mouse mode" being on in the browser but if the app is wrapped, that could be handled. On my Samsung TV downstairs, it looks like it's the Web UI as the app, so again why not on Android TV as well?

[seanbuff 1316]

Hi, you can try sideloading the standard Android app onto your TV device and see how that compares.

https://emby.media/emby-for-android.html

[Happy2Play 9780]

Browsers are going to have limited codec support vs native clients.

[Luke 42078]

Quote

Why not just wrap the web UI (maybe with some tweaks) into a Cordova app and save development time?

HI, our standard android app does this, although not with Cordova. But we swap out the audio/video player for a native android player as well as other native functions whenever possible. So yes you sideload that.

[jasonb1 7]

Thanks, I tried the standard Android app on a Fire TV Stick 4K Max (it shows as version 3.2.40) and hit a couple of issues (but overall it's looking like what I asked for, thanks!):

1. The keyboard can't be popped up. I was able to log in using Emby Connect which bypasses that need for keyboard. It appears to be a general problem as it doesn't pop up on search either.

2. (very minor) The icon on the launcher screen looks like some generic X'd out thing, but sometimes I see the Emby icon flicker there for a second.

3. Some sluggishness in redrawing stuff after I had scrolled down to "X" in the list (probably some 30000+ down in the list of Movies), playing a video, escaping out, escaping out to home didn't draw all the rows right away or going back in to that same video the screen was blank but eventually filled in after several seconds. Not sure if that's my server being slow due to still extracting thumbnails but I don't remember seeing that when using the web UI with the Silk browser. (this one is probably not actionable at this point given the vague info I've given).

[Luke 42078]

Thanks yes a couple others have reported the keyboard problem on fire devices and we're looking into it.