Building TV Apps

Android offers a rich user experience that's optimized for apps running on large screen devices, such as high-definition televisions. Apps on TV offer new opportunities to delight your users from the comfort of their couch.

TV apps use the same structure as those for phones and tablets. This approach means you can create new TV apps based on what you already know about building apps for Android, or extend your existing apps to also run on TV devices. However, the user interaction model for TV is substantially different from phone and tablet devices. In order to make your app successful on TV devices, you must design new layouts that can be easily understood from 10 feet away, and provide navigation that works with just a directional pad and a select button.

This class describes how to start building apps for TV, including setting up your development environment, basic requirements for layouts and navigation, as well as guidance on how to handle hardware features that are not typically available on TV devices.

Note: You are encouraged to use Android Studio for building TV apps, because it provides project setup, library inclusion, and packaging conveniences. This training assumes you are using Android Studio.

Lessons

Getting Started with TV Apps

Learn how to create a new Android Studio project for TV apps or modify your existing app project to run on TV devices.

Building TV Layouts

Learn the minimum requirements for TV layouts and how to implement them.

Creating TV Navigation

Learn the requirements for TV navigation and how to implement TV-compatible navigation.

Handling TV Hardware

Learn how to check if your app is running on TV hardware, handle unsupported hardware features, and manage controller devices.