Smart TVs have become an indispensable part of our lives, as the burgeoning demand for developing innovative and captivating apps. It has the potential to capture the attention of millions of viewers.
Hence, presents a golden opportunity for entrepreneurs to make a distinct mark in this expanding market. However, a smart tv app development company needs to build promising solutions to provide a competitive edge with expert insights.
Let’s delve into solutions to overcome the challenges of developing a smart TV app.
Smart TV Platform Fragmentation
The world of smart TV app development is still very fragmented. You can agree to the fact that the mobile app development realm has already conquered 100% of the global market through its iOS and Android applications.
The first support to the fragmented smart TV app market is that the customers are not at all loyal to a particular device because they use multiple platforms during the day. Hence, it is essential for the developers to create a platform that allows integration with multiple devices.
Besides this, according to Conviva, smart TVs have the highest viewing hours, capturing 35.3% of the global market based on their viewing hours. However, you need to properly evaluate the market to help customers find the right brands, expand the viewership of the app, increase ROI, and much more.
In fact, you can choose to define a matrix of preferred smart TVs, and set-top boxes to build a futuristic and compatible app. Also, scrutinize the documentation of particular smart TV platforms to avoid any compatibility issues with different devices in the future.
Furthermore, follow the guidelines when you are deploying an app along with providing comprehensive API support. Sometimes things are also complicated with the new versions of the operating systems because they are not always compatible with the older TV hardware.
This led to a stage when the smart TV app became incompatible with the newest features. But, you can easily solve this challenge by pre-defining matrices of necessary OSes, evaluating the feasibility of compatibility with older systems, and integrating customized codes to make the app compatible with the legacy TV hardware.
Things to Consider Highly Functional Usability and UX
It is necessary to consider the peculiarities of the UX and UI of a smart TV app development. Here’s what you must consider for building a great app and complying with the app store standards.
CSS style libraries
The optimal usage of CSS libraries is important by proper evaluation of its ins and outs to ensure smooth watching from a 3-4 metre distance. You need to pay attention to address the blinking and backlight bleeding issues. Also, consider the accurate distribution of the content across the screens.
In-app navigation
It is necessary to have frictionless navigation. This means you must avoid drop-down type menus and ensure smoother transitions between the pages. Also, don’t forget to integrate an intuitive “back” button. Furthermore, try to integrate quick navigation tricks to process the complex commands in minimum clicks.
Focus state development
Developing a focus state is another crucial area of smart TV app development because it helps users to identify where they are. So, make sure you consider developing a recognizable focus for the users, just like smartphones.
💡 A Tip:-
You can try to concentrate on developing a focus that doesn’t blend with the other elements like menu buttons or interface background.
For instance, if you are focussing on multiple devices, developing the app with one codebase logic should be preferred.
Important UX Features to Engage Viewers
When it comes to smart TV app development, many customized characteristics like custom keyboards, voice-powered controls, etc. are incorporated. These require lots of research work, monetary investments, and efforts too. Hence, supposed to be discussed and elaborated well in advance.
Here are a few things that viewers prefer should be integrated with the smart TV applications:-
Voice Search
Affiliating to the changing UX habits of the customers, the developers are incorporating voice-search features with their latest devices. However, to do the same you will have to incorporate Google Assistant, Alexa, or Amazon Echo to provide this option to the viewers.
Personalized Content Search
The modern era of video content engagement is majorly user-driven and enables personalized discoverability of content. It helps them to watch what they want to watch. This also saves them time because they won’t have to scroll through the entire library.
Synchronized Usage Across Multiple Platforms
You might observe that there is an increase in the integration of smart TV user accounts with other platforms. Likewise, you can consider it as this allows you to set up parental control on the smart TV app, and from there, the content is accessible on the web platforms and mobiles. For example, this makes it easier for users to continue watching their favorite shows from their smartphones while going to work.
Besides all these tips discussed above, you can also simplify the UI to further enhance the front-end performances. For this, you can use React renderers despite using HTML DOM elements. Also, you can omit complex CSS styles like 3D or shadows.
Don’t forget to pay particular attention to performance profiling because TV is a low-memory device, unlike PCs. It will also help you to detect any CPU limitations, TV memory errors, uninitialized memory concerns, or improper/reallocation of memory. Furthermore, it would be a great idea to consider writing a custom code to keep a top-notch backend performance.
With this, you can smartly integrate the single-code architecture as your core coding along with customizing the specific needs of the platform.
Wrapping Up
By now, you might have understood various measures to overcome challenges during the smart TV app development. Besides this, app store rejection is another problem that an app faces. Usually, this happens due to the poor streaming speed. So, enhance its streaming capabilities to avoid any delays, resubmissions, or postponed market releases.
Also Read: Are Smart TV’s Worthy
