A request to Emby - please clarify the situation with the AndroidTv app

[mrmech 6]

Final Clarification!

• Emby For Android (Icon w/Black Circle) is actively developed.
• Emby For Android TV (Icon w/White Circle) is simply maintained.

[FrostByte 5618]

Supposedly, but Eric has also been adding a few minor things (i.e. HEVC transcoding) which are in the new app.

Looking at the release notes of each show both are still being worked

 

Eric is still busy working on the older app

 

Edited August 17 by FrostByte

[hudsonr92 1]

Must say that while I understand having a single app is easier to maintain and if it was actually good on TVs, I would certainly say its best to.
However you can NOT tell me there is any dev that has an Android TV, had both apps installed and said "yes, the non-TV version is fine". No way in hell.

I will see if I can make an more detailed list with gripes but just look at the steps you need to go through to change settings, add subtitles, go ahead a bit with chapters... with Android for TV all you have to do is just up arrow chapters, down arrow for everything else and youre done. You can reach everything with 2 button presses only using buttons close to eachother.
The normal Emby app on Android TV literally feels like the mobile app stretched out.. made for me touching my television instead of using an remote.

Edited yesterday at 06:33 AM by hudsonr92

[lbkBrad 4]

I mostly use Roku, but I finally watched a movie on the 'new' Emby android app (hisense 4k tv w/android 14) and thought I'd comment.  First, I think it's great that Emby is making both old and new android clients available to users.  When Plex began their 'new experience' GUI and started the war (never have I seen such anger in forum threads), some plex users asked for the old client to be made available unmaintained at least for a while, but it didn't happen.  Emby seems to not just be doing that, but even apparently making some minor updates to the old client - I think this is a better approach and Emby should be commended for doing so.

I didn't have any issues watching a movie on the android client.  It played fine, looked good, and (remote) navigation was normal.  I also think the appearance of the android app is pretty good.  Because of plex issues and an intensive jellyfin trial I did, I've probably used at least a dozen client GUIs in recent months - I'd say the Emby android app is probably up there with the best of them looks-wise.  Also, the 3-dots/ellipsis button having access to metadata/image editing and other things usually done in the server web interface is really cool (I think only plex is barely starting to do this with some of their preview/beta apps).

I'm not trying to say the new android client is perfect.  For instance, I can only see 12 movies on my 'newly added' row, which is incredibly short (I thought I had misconfigured something, but found no setting).  As someone very dependent on the newly-added list for watching, that would probably be too short for me to use this as my primary client.  But I guess that's why the old client is available huh.  Regardless,  it seems like the new android client is moving in a good direction....and of course all this is mostly personal preference and that's just mine.