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Best practices to drive engagement on Google TV

Android TV OS powers millions of TVs, streaming devices, and PayTV set-top boxes. Google TV is a brand-new experience available first on the Chromecast with Google TV and to more devices over time.

All apps built for Android TV work on devices running Google TV. To provide the best user experience on Google TV, we recommend that you apply the best practices in this guide.

Note: To ensure a great user experience, all TV apps must meet specific requirements for usability before they are available for TVs on Google Play. For more information, see TV app quality.

Baseline requirements

Support Google Cast: Google Cast lets you extend your Android, iOS, and Chrome apps to enable audio and video streaming to Android TVs as well as Chromecast devices and Assistant devices. For more information, see the Google Cast documentation.

Use media sessions: media sessions provide a universal way of interacting with an audio or video player. When an app informs Android that it is playing media, playback controls can be delegated to the app. Integrating with the media session lets an app advertise media playback externally and receive playback commands from external sources. These sources can be physical buttons, such as the play button on a headset or TV remote control, or indirect commands, such as instructing "pause" to Google Assistant. The media session then delegates these commands to the app, which applies them to the media player where the commands originated. See Using a media session for more details.

Content discovery across surfaces

Offer a media actions feed: when you provide a JSON media actions feed to Google, your content can be discovered through Google TV recommendations and other Google surfaces, such as Google Search. The deep links you provide let users jump directly into playback of your content to increase engagement. The feed also enables on-device search and the ability to play media using Google Assistant voice commands.

Google is working with a limited number of providers at a time to integrate them into this feature. For more details, see the Media Actions documentation.

Integrate Watch Next: Watch Next lets users re-engage with the content in your app. When users leave your app partway through a movie or with a TV series in progress, you can surface that content directly on the Google TV home screen using Watch Next. The user can select a tile to deep link directly into playback within your app. Note that a Watch Next integration must be certified for quality to show on Google TV devices. See the Watch Next documentation for more details.

Voice and engagement

Support account linking: account linking provides seamless linking between a user's Google account and your app's account to facilitate a streamlined user experience for your app's existing and new users. Account linking is a prerequisite for other capabilities such as frictionless subscriptions, entitlement sync, and voice casting.

Support entitlement sync: if your media actions feed includes media with entitlement requirements—for example, a user needs to have a particular subscription to access content—you can support entitlement sync to declare which subscriptions a linked account has. See the entitlements endpoint documentation for more details.

Offer voice casting: voice casting lets your users initiate media playback on supported Cast devices through Google Assistant. You can enable this functionality by providing a media actions feed, supporting account linking, and creating a Cast receiver.

Enable Cast Connect: with Cast Connect, your Android TV app can act as a Cast receiver. This lets you provide a richer experience and support interaction with the remote control. See the Android TV Receiver Overview for more details.

User acquisition

Integrate Google Play Billing: use the Play Billing library to support in-app purchases and manage subscriptions across both mobile and TV. See the billing documentation for more details.

Provide frictionless subscriptions: by combining streamlined account linking, Play Billing with real time developer notifications, and silent sign-in, you can provide a seamless purchase experience for your users. Watch the Frictionless Subscriptions video for more details.

Google TV feature evaluation

An app built for Android TV OS works for all the devices in the TV ecosystem, including new Google TV branded devices. To know whether a device offers the Google TV experience, for instance for analytics, you can evaluate or filter on the system feature com.google.android.feature.

Learn more about Android TV OS

Build apps that let users experience your app's immersive content on the big screen. Users can discover your content recommendations on the home screen. The Leanback library provides APIs to help you build a great user experience for a remote control.

Get started

Build TV apps

To make your app successful on TVs, design new layouts that provide a clear, discernible view from 10 feet away and simple navigation that works with just a directional pad and a select button.

Learn how

Android 14 for TV

Android 14 for TV enables picture-in-picture mode on compatible devices and adds the improvements from Android 13 to compatible consumer devices.

Find out more

Recommend content on the home screen

Help users discover your app content by creating recommendations that appear in one or more channels on the home screen.

Learn about recommendations

Android on TV

Design

The Android TV platform user interface provides the launch pad for your app's big screen experience. It's important to understand how your app is presented in the main user interface and how your app can help users get to the content they want quickly.

Help users find your content on Android TV

TV devices offer many entertainment options with thousands of choices from apps and related content services. At the same time, most users prefer using a TV with the least amount of input possible. With so many choices available, your app should provide quick and easy paths for users to discover and enjoy your content.

You can help users discover your content through recommendations on the home screen, making your app searchable, and integrating your content with the Google Assistant. This topic provides an overview of each of these areas and links out to related topics and resources for more information.

Recommend content on the home screen

The Android TV home screen displays recommended content using channels and programs. Channels are displayed as individual rows on the home screen, with cards that display all of the available programs for that channel.

To learn more, see Recommend content on the home screen.

Make your app searchable

Android TV uses the Android search interface to retrieve content data from installed apps and deliver search results to the user. Your app's content data can be included with these results, to give the user instant access to the content in your app.

To learn more, see Make TV apps searchable.

Integrate with the Google Assistant

Your app can integrate with the Google Assistant on Android TV by implementing search and playback controls. For a high level overview, read this post on the Android Developers blog.

- Search

The Google Assistant can query your app if you make your app searchable. Note that the deeplink you provide to the Google Assistant should either be a universal link or have the android-app:// scheme.

- Playback Controls

The Google Assistant on Android TV uses a media session to send commands to your app.

If you are using ExoPlayer, you can integrate with the Google Assistant easily using a MediaSessionConnector, which is an extension for ExoPlayer. To learn more, read this post on the Android Developers blog.

Additional resources

To learn more about helping users find content on Android TV, see the following additional resources.

- Samples

Sample: Leanback Support Library Showcase App for Android TV

This sample app showcases different components that come with Leanback library.

Article: Android TV Channel app (TV Input) using TIF

This sample demonstrates how to build live TV channel apps for Android TV using the TV Input Framework (TIF).

- Codelabs

Codelab: Introduction to Compose for TV

Learn the basics of Compose for TV and create two screens that are commonly available in TV apps.

Blogs

Blog: Everything you need to know about Google TV and Android TV OS

Updated May 16, 2024

Over the past year, we’ve seen significant growth of Android TV OS, reaching 220 million monthly active devices with a 47% year-over-year increase. This incredible engagement would not be possible without our dedicated developer community. A massive

Blog: 15 Things to know for Android developers at Google I/O

Updated May 15, 2024

AI is unlocking experiences that were not even possible a few years ago, and we’ve been hard at work reimaging Android with AI at the core, to help enable you to build a whole new class of apps. At this year’s Google I/O, we’re covering how new tools

Blog: Building pixel-perfect living room experiences with Compose for TV

Updated May 11, 2023

Over the past year, we’ve continued to see significant growth on Android TV OS, now with over 150 million monthly active devices. In fact, according to Strategy Analytics, the Android TV streaming platform shipped on more devices worldwide than any

Blog: Android 13 for TV is now available

Updated December 3, 2022

Here’s a look at some of what’s new in Android 13 for TV. Android 13 brings new APIs to the big screen that help developers deliver high quality experiences to users across different device types. Android 13 brings new features to make interacting

Blog: App Bundles for Google TV and Android TV

Updated November 22, 2022

TLDR: Google TV and Android TV will be requiring Android App Bundles that are archivable starting in May 2023 to save storage for users. Over the past few decades, TV has transformed from linear channel surfing to on-demand content with multi-app

Blog: What’s new with Google TV & Android TV OS

Updated May 13, 2022

Shobana Radhakrishnan, Senior Director of Engineering - Google TV Paul Lammertsma, Developer Relations Engineer Today, there is more entertainment content available than ever before. In fact, our research shows a third of U.S. households now watch

Blog: 13 Things to know for Android developers at Google I/O!

Updated May 12, 2022

There aren’t many platforms where you can build something and instantly reach billions of people around the world, not only on their phones—but their TVs, cars, tablets, watches, and more. Today, at Google I/O, we covered a number of ways Android

- Videos

YouTube: Improving the TV user experience

Updated November 11, 2022

YouTube: Android development on Chrome OS

Updated August 13, 2020

YouTube: What’s new on Android TV

Updated August 10, 2020

YouTube: Cast Connect

Updated August 10, 2020

YouTube: Android Beyond Phones: Auto/Wear/TV/ChromeOS week preview

Updated August 9, 2020

YouTube: What’s new with Android TV (Google I/O '18)

Updated May 9, 2018

YouTube: Android TV: How to engage more users and earn more revenue (Google I/O '17)

Updated May 20, 2017

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