Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google TV is making it easier to see when an app is updating.
- This redesign lets you see update progress right from the home screen.
- Update progress should be available on all Google TV devices.
How often do you really think about app updates on Google TV? For most of us, it all gets handled in the background, you can probably count on one hand the number of times you’ve needed to update an app yourself. What you’re probably much more familiar with is trying to open an app, only to find it’s in the process of already updating. While that’s only been a minor annoyance, to be sure, it is one that should be getting a lot easier to see coming, thanks to a change that’s just been spotted.
On the Google TV home screen, your apps are shown in a row below the recommended videos at the top. As noticed by 9to5Google, these rounded app icons will now show update progress with a ring around the icon, and the design is reminiscent of what we see on Pixel phones when apps are updating.
This probably won’t be something you notice too often. On our smartphones, we bounce between apps regularly, spending a lot of time navigating the home screen. Our TVs are different, and once we’ve decided what we want to watch, it’s unlikely that we’ll be headed back to the home screen for at least half an hour — probably longer. That, combined with how often updates tend to happen, has made it harder to pinpoint when this change happened. We weren’t immediately able to test it on our Google TV devices, with no updates currently available. 9to5Google found it on several devices, though, suggesting reasonably wide access, and it’s even possible this has been here for a while already, and has just flown under the radar.
Google TV has received a few quality of life updates recently, with one of the highlights being Google Home integration, making it easy to adjust smart lights and other devices right from the Google TV control panel. Google TV is a mature platform at this point, but it’s encouraging to see Google is still making changes where it can, especially when said changes make the platform easier to use rather than being a change for change’s sake.
