Daring Fireball: Today Is the Launch of Max, and It Sucks Even More Than I Thought It Would:

This much moronity I expected. But it gets worse. As Judge documents, with the new app they’ve once again dropped tvOS’s excellent native video player for a custom video player that utterly sucks: “up next” support in the TV app is now broken or missing, HDR and frame-rate match are gone, the new video player doesn’t support the Siri remote’s jog support, no picture-in-picture, and no support for the wonderful “What did they just say?” feature (speak that to your Siri remote and the video jumps back 10 seconds or so and temporarily enables subtitles).

HBO Max was a really good tvOS app. Max is a poor one.

The built-in tvOS player is really good, and apps that use it get a great experience to wrap their own content discovery experience around. Dumping that, probably to exploit telemetry data, makes this a non-starter for me… Though I was already tapped out on “max” due to the direction they’re dumping CNN and platforming partnerships with a noted transphobic author.