Chris Welch writing for The Verge: Netflix Says Its Brief Apple TV App Integration Was a Mistake

Considering the trajectory of 2025 so far, perhaps we should’ve known that Netflix finally playing nice with the Apple TV app was too good to be true. And now the streaming giant has confirmed that’s exactly the case.

Well, I woke up this morning excited about Netflix and I will go to sleep disappointed with them. I have two things to say here and one prediction.

One, what a silly spot to be in for Netflix. They started rolling out a thing that people wanted and garnered happy headlines all day, only to have to tell everyone that this nice thing you started doing was a bug and you’re going to stop doing that nice thing. The saddest of trombones for you, Mr. Hastings.

And two, this is all made more frustrating because shows don’t just randomly show up in the TV interface on accident; the code has to have been written to do this integration in the first place. This means the bug was that Netflix was giving this user-centric feature, not that it existed in the first place. They could give us nice things, they just choose not to.

My prediction is that this feature will be coming to tvOS sometime in the relatively near future, but it’s not ready to officially be launched, so someone likely pushed an update with the feature flag toggled the wrong direction. Again, shows don’t just randomly show up in the TV app on accident, work had to be done to make this possible, even if on accident, so I maintain hope we simply got a glimpse of an update before the press release, marketing, and testing processes had completed.

I gotta be positive about what I can right now, you know?