Continue Watching

[Susan K]

Apple TV Continue Watching seems to work intermittently and now is back to not keeping track of which episode I'm on. I've tried all the suggested solutions and it still doesn't work. This is not acceptable customer service. I'm tired of spending my time trying to fix problems from untested changes or created and not addressed by the creator of the product. It seems to be a far worse problem with Apple products than Android. Very irresponsible of Apple to alienate their customers. For now I've deleted almost everything from Continue Watching to make managing this manually a bit easier, but I'm really close to going back to Android.

 

[texag76]

Apple TV Continue Watching seems to work intermittently and now is back to not keeping track of which episode I'm on. I've tried all the suggested solutions and it still doesn't work. This is not acceptable customer service. I'm tired of spending my time trying to fix problems from untested changes or created and not addressed by the creator of the product. It seems to be a far worse problem with Apple products than Android. Very irresponsible of Apple to alienate their customers. For now I've deleted almost everything from Continue Watching to make managing this manually a bit easier, but I'm really close to going back to Android.

I understand your frustration with ATV and its flakey CONTINUE WATCHING feature but not sure what your threat of " going back to android" means. ATV is the only streaming box and service that has ANY functioning CONTINUE WATCHING feature that somewhat aggregates across the streamers ( except for Netflix who refuses to cooperate ). I don think that there are ANY other options available so as weak and flakey as Apple TV's feature is there just isn't any other way to aggregate your shows across the jumble of platforms. BTW: someone is missing a golden opportunity if they did develop a functioning cross platform aggregator that you could manage on a desktop or even an iPad.

 

[cynics]

Apple TV Continue Watching seems to work intermittently and now is back to not keeping track of which episode I'm on. I've tried all the suggested solutions and it still doesn't work. This is not acceptable customer service. I'm tired of spending my time trying to fix problems from untested changes or created and not addressed by the creator of the product. It seems to be a far worse problem with Apple products than Android. Very irresponsible of Apple to alienate their customers. For now I've deleted almost everything from Continue Watching to make managing this manually a bit easier, but I'm really close to going back to Android.

Issues with Continue Watching from the AppleTV app are mostly the fault of the developer of the streaming app and their implementation of the feature. So if its AppleTV+ then its totally Apples fault if its a different streaming service its the fault of its developer.

I say "mostly" the fault of the developer because it's an overly troublesome feature to integrate and maintain without too much compromise to your apps functionality.

For example if your app can play audio in the background it won't sync Continue Watching properly. If you app intentionally hides the AV players buttons for an overlay (skip intro for example) it will fail to sync. If going back to the main menu of an app causes the player to deallocate it can kill the process before the content progression is sync'd. And if you're using a customer player all bets are off, you need to manually maintain the lifecycles of the API's required for the feature, code for near instantly sync'ing progress if the user presses the home button, also sync'ing locally, service side, and Apple cloud. Most apps that use customer players the developer don't even bother with any integration.

Unfortunately I feel the feature might be at the top of your priority list and at the bottom of developers.