My main beef with the roku is the sluggishness of the UI. And I have a few of them in the house (ultras or whatever the top of the line one was as of six months ago. Amazon had a sale and I bought a few). I also have a bunch of Apple TV 4Ks.
Say I am watching Plex and then want to switch to Netflix and then maybe go over to Channels to watch some News on MSNBC. The Apple TV can do this without reloading the app or losing my place in the video. It is nearly instant. The Roku has to reload the entire app taking a minute and losing my place.
Interesting. I have the 4K Apple TV and sometimes apps feel extremely sluggish. Netflix clearly has some sort of compounding problem (maybe a memory leak) where simply scrolling through the app gets progressively slower until it’s nearly completely unusable. Killing and restarting the app fixes it temporarily.
I haven't noticed that in Netflix. But 80% of my use of the Apple TV is plex and a little app I wrote that reads directories on my computer running Apache and shows everything in a directory structure. And a bash script that runs through everything calling HandBrakeCli (if needed), generates thumbnails with ffmpeg, and then creates the xml.js file the app reads.
It took around six hours to build and I had zero experience with any tvos or ios development. Just a fun covid-project.
Sluggishness switching apps? Probably a result of supporting a lot of very low-end devices. I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of their active devices in the field have very poor specs. And probably cost less than $100 when originally purchased—often way less. You’re not getting a bunch of fast SSD memory to suspend programs to, nor enough RAM to keep several open, on that kind of budget.
The CEO of Roku said in an interview on a podcast that their goal is to keep the build of materials needed to run the software under $25 for the TV manufacturers.
They do a damn good job. Sure opening an app takes a few seconds and apps tend not to do much to save and restore state when re-opened (the app developers could do more of that, if they cared to) but the experience in any given app is usually pretty smooth and snappy, considering what it's running on. It's a testament to how good UI can be even on fairly low-end hardware when you're not fundamentally screwing up performance, repeatedly, over several levels of abstraction.
On one hand, for a smart TV platform, there are a lot of positives. First and foremost it’s Switzerland. It’s neutral and everything is available for it - amazingly enough even AppleTV. As you said, the interface isn’t bad given the hardware constraints, and they support their hardware as long as feasible. I had a few Roku boxes back in 2011. I have three Roku TVs and will probably have two more by the end if the year. I also bought my dad one.
On the other hand, I hate the ads that take up half the screen and the hard coded buttons. The UI is decent, but not as responsive as my AppleTV 4K.
Our first streaming device was a Fire Stick. Talk about sluggish. Wow. We replaced it with a 2017 Nvidia Shield TV (even though we're an Apple house, go figure). Much better.
Say I am watching Plex and then want to switch to Netflix and then maybe go over to Channels to watch some News on MSNBC. The Apple TV can do this without reloading the app or losing my place in the video. It is nearly instant. The Roku has to reload the entire app taking a minute and losing my place.
But I do like the Roku remote. So there is that.