Over the “next few months,” Google TV will slowly roll out an updated home screen with rounded app icons. The update also includes various quality of life improvements, including a dedicated “reorder apps” button.
This update mainly affects the “Your Apps” row on Google TV’s home screen. At a glance, rounded app icons appear to be the biggest change—Google TV is transitioning to rounded app icons and ditching the old rectangular icons that it’s used for some years.
The rounded app icons are more compact than rectangular icons, meaning that more app shortcuts can fit on your TV screen at a time. Additionally, the new rounded icons should help differentiate the “Your Apps” row from “Top Picks” and other categories.
Scrolling to the end of the redesigned “Your Apps” row reveals a new “reorder” button. It allows you to quickly change the order of pinned apps on your home screen. Previously, you had to press and hold on an individual app to change its location in the “Your Apps” lineup, which was both an unintuitive and excruciatinglyslow process.
Google TV is also gaining two features from Android TV—the “Add Apps” shortcut, which makes it easier to pin apps to the home screen, and a dedicated “Free TV” app. The Free TV app contains all of Google’s FAST channels. These are the same channels that you’ll find in the “Live” tab at the top of Google TV’s home screen.
We first caught wind of the redesigned Google TV home screen in November 2023. That’s when Google began asking developers to create new app icons for circular formatting. Evidently, this update has been in the works for a while. And it will take a similarly long time for the redesign to reach all Google TV users.
According to Google, the redesigned Google TV home screen will take a “few months” to complete its rollout. This is to be expected, as Google TV updates tend to arrive at a very sluggish pace. Presumably, the first-party Chromecast with Google TV will receive the update before third-party smart TVs or streaming sticks.
Source: Google via Android Police
