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I turned my streaming stick into a dumb app launcher, and that's all it should be
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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I haven't used other streaming boxes lately, but I find this hard to believe, mainly because of the shitty AppleTV remote with the godawful touchpad that everybody decided to implement different gestures for and which is notoriously difficult to gesture properly with and only when intended to
otherwise, I do agree that the AppleTV itself is quite polished. I use it for any streaming services that I may have, which is not many lately but was quite a few in the past, Plex, and YouTube primarily. also used to do some Zwift on it before I changed to using an iPad.
besides the absolutely horrible remote that for some reason doesn't have actual buttons for arrows and confirm, the rest of the experience actually is quite good and generally anything that is not is to do with the apps themselves. for example, Sportsnet is just a fucking terrible app no matter what platform you're on.
The current remote has physical buttons that have a track pad over the surface of them. You can completely disable the track pad and gestures and just use it like a plain old remote if you want. The gestures-only remote was replaced years ago, thankfully.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mw5g3am/a/siri-remote
This is the old one that I assume you’re talking about?
It's ironic how the only place to reliably navigate back on an Apple device is through the Apple TV remote.
The remote is shit, yes, and there’s an alternative to it. I can’t recall whether or not they’ve fixed that on the newer AppleTv remotes or not, but I detest that there’s no mute, either.
That said, it’s still pretty good, especially compared to the alternatives. The Roku keeps enshittifying harder and harder
You must also be thinking of the older one which was crap. This is the current one which has clicky physical buttons that also can act as a gesture pad, and a mute button.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mw5g3am/a/siri-remote
This was the garbage one before that: