The Total Failure of a Phone App Update

 The Total Failure of a Phone App Update

A few years ago, the TV Guide phone app for Android (I don't know about Apple) was a very nice TV listings apps. Good layout, good channel selection, easy time navigation, obvious notation of new episodes. About two years ago it was updated and the ease of navigation was lost. User complaints caused them to back up to the previous version. I don't know how any tester would agree that the update was an improvement, but they listened to their users and fixed it.

In January 2021, the app start giving notice that some of its features would be temporarily disabled and a new version would be introduced shortly. The disabled feature that I noticed first was that I couldn't select any channels, so the app became completely useless. I waited patiently and the day came when the update was released. I selected the over the air channels for my zip code and was shown about a hundred channels. I receive about 15 of those and use five. I tried to select those five so that I didn't have to scroll through 100 channels to find the schedule. There was no way to do that.

Okay, so I went on to look at the listings. The top half of the screen was an ad for a show that I would never watch. Scrolling down to find a channel that I often watch, I discovered that I can only get the schedule for now until four hours later. Since it was early afternoon, I couldn't find out if my favorite Monday night show would be on tonight or if it was a new episode. Or if there was anything interesting on another channel tonight.

And there was no way to choose another day, past or future. And there was no way to change the channels that I chose.

The new app is useless for the traditional TV schedule.

I went to the Google Play App Store to do a review. Changed my rating from 4 stars to 1 - the ratings go from 1 to 5. I wish I had noted the current overall rating at the time. I suspect it was about 4.

The next day, I looked to see if there was a response or update. No. But there was a long list of one star reviews - terrible, horrible, useless, pointless. The overall rating was 2.6 and the 1 ratings were about twice the 5 ratings (just a few 2,3,4 ratings). The next day, today, the overall rating is 1.5, with the 1 ratings over ten times the 5 ratings.

So what happened? At first I thought naive young people designing the new app - they only watch streaming TV. They love fancy graphics instead of information. They have no idea what is needed to convey TV listing information.

Then I remembered that the app used to note CBS Entertainment and now it only notes Red Ventures. I searched the internet and found that CBS has sold the CNET Media group, including TV Guide, to Red Ventures.

This next part is PURE SPECULATION.

They wanted to save money so they canceled some contract and this required an updated app.

They wanted more ad revenue so they put large ads at the top of the listings, reducing information density.

They went to the TV streaming services and sold ad space for their shows (ads pretending to be content), and redirected the aim of the app to streaming content instead of traditional television. But there is no schedule for streaming TV, so they moved to recommending shows instead of showing schedules.

They shorted the traditional television content because there was no time to do it all. Or maybe they thought it was obsolete.

END OF SPECULATION

The result is a useless app. And I expect that the ad revenue has dropped to near zero.

I watch streaming shows. I watch them whenever I want to. I watch whatever I want and I find recommendations to be pretty worthless. I don't need an app to help.

I switched to another TV listing app. Poor layout, only today and tomorrow. Can't find anything better.

And I'm not expecting them to revert to the old version or fix the new one. Smart phones take another step downhill.

ONE WEEK LATER

No comment from Red Ventures. Rating - 1.3 stars. And no change to the new app.

My solution to the problem - use zap2it.com in my phone browser. It has one big advantage over the old TV Guide app - you can tell it to start up with the time set to prime time. And a big disadvantage - just one hour displayed, with clunky scrolling.