Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: Users and developers are fighting back against bloated smart TV UIs, and the backlash against AI glasses is growing.

A quick note: Next week’s newsletter will likely come to you a bit earlier in the week than usual. We’ll be back to the regular schedule the week after, and then take off the first week of August for a much-needed vacation.

“Apple TV hardware is now essentially dead,” declared streaming media analyst Dan Rayburn earlier this week. Rayburn’s claim was prompted by Apple’s recent decision to raise the price of its Apple TV streamer, with the entry-level model now costing $70 more than just a month ago. “I don't envision anyone in the market spending $200 on a streaming device,” Rayburn quipped.

Whether Apple’s price increase actually killed Apple TV remains to be seen. However, there’s already a bunch of tinkerers out there looking to keep the spirit of the company’s streaming hardware alive, albeit on a range of much more affordable streamers and smart TVs. One of them is Nico Klein, the developer of Monet – an alternative home screen environment for Google’s Google TV and Android TV platforms.

“Apple TVs are genuinely great, really strong hardware, really good UI design,” Klein tells me. “But they're also pretty expensive, and nowhere near as customizable as a launcher on Android.”

Monet is just one of a number of home screen replacements (or launchers, as they’re called among Android enthusiasts) that takes cues from Apple TV to bring a new sense of minimalism to Google’s streaming platform. Most of these launchers do away with the endless rows of content recommendations, the big hero images that try to get you hooked on the latest TV shows, and the increasing amount of ads and sponsored content.

“Honestly, the stock Google TV launcher [keeps] getting worse,” Klein says. “It's clunky and full of ads. It actively gets in the way of what users are trying to do. You have to fight your way through a jungle of menus just to get where you actually want to go, it's just not intuitive.”

Monet is very much the opposite of this. At present, the launcher puts a heavy emphasis on a customizable list of favorite apps. Users can also opt to display a "Continue Watching” row as well as one customizable row of content recommendations from installed apps. There’s also the option to include app folders as well as further custom app rows, widgets, and even user profiles.  

But if you prefer, you can also use Monet to strip down your TV home screen to show just a few tiles for your most-used services. (The image above is a screenshot of Monet running on the TV in my bedroom.)

The case for (and against) content-forward UIs

Google is just one of many smart TV platform operators to bet on what’s known among industry insiders as a content-forward user interface: Instead of just presenting users a long list of app icons, these platforms curate content from those streaming services. This allows users to browse lists of action movies, sports events or YouTube clips directly on the home screen.

In theory, this approach does away with the need to browse the catalog of each streaming service you use separately. In practice, there are still a lot of shortcomings, often brought about by diverging business interests. Netflix, for instance, would very much prefer its subscribers to discover its shows within its own app, and has been resisting disaggregation efforts. As a result, Netflix titles are frequently absent from content-forward UIs.

And then there are the ads. Most streaming dongles sell at or below cost, and the margins on smart TVs are razor-thin. Hardware companies and platform operators instead make their money with ads and subscription fees, which are increasingly showing up on TV home screens as well.

The latest example for this is Roku, which began rolling out a revamped UI in May. After long sticking to its tried-and-true app-centric formula, Roku is now bringing additional content recommendations to its home screen as well. That includes more prominent ads. “Home screen monetization, like adding video in our home screen, has been very positive for us,” Roku CFO Dan Jedda told investors in April.