:app-tv

One piece of state rather than four booleans, because the states are exclusive. Four flags can express "playing and in settings", which is not a thing, and the code would have to keep proving it never happens.

The three cases exist because they are genuinely three things, and flattening them into "a Channel and a list" was a reported bug. A film got the channel keys mapped to "zap to the next film", the controls announced it as live, and a series — whose row carries no episode stream — was asked to play a URL that plays nothing.

Making the distinction a type means the player cannot be handed a series by accident and cannot forget to pass an episode's URL: there is no shape of this class that expresses either mistake.

It replaced a readout. The remote's own keys still drive playback with nothing on screen — that is the fastest way to pause something — but a remote has keys for about five things, and every feature past those five was arriving on a key that already meant something else.

Each button carries its own four directions. Compose finds a focus target by looking at where things are, and the two rows barely line up: left to geometry, down from the play button landed on the options row's last button, and right off the end of that row jumped back up to the transport. Measured with a D-pad walk at the panel's real geometry, not argued.

Nothing changes size on focus. A focused control that grows reports a rectangle that moves every frame while the animation runs, and that has already cost this project four wrong answers about a shaking catalogue.

It slides in from the right because it arrives on its own: something appearing unasked has to be seen arriving, or a viewer looks up at a countdown already at two with no idea what started it. Focus lands on Play now, so carrying on is one press.

The closest thing this app puts on a television to a modal, and deliberately not one — playback has already stopped so nothing is covered, it takes a corner rather than the middle, it cannot be arrived at by accident, and both ways out are on screen at once.

Extracted as a plain function so the one thing a reviewer needs to check is not buried in a modifier, and so the awkward cases can be asserted rather than tried by hand on a television.

The settings gear is a position along the bar rather than a focusable of its own. An icon that opts out of the bar's one-focusable model cannot be reached at all: it sits inside that focusable, so a focus search walks past it into the content below. The gear was unreachable by remote for the entire life of the app.

On a television the key map is the interface. Where a key does nothing — seeking on a live stream, the channel keys during a film — it is left unhandled rather than swallowed, so it falls through to the system instead of being absorbed by a player that has nothing to do with it.

Search is first and is the only one drawn as an icon: a magnifier needs no word beside it, and the leftmost position is where a remote already rests when the app opens. It is also where Back comes to rest — Back from any catalogue lands here, and Back again leaves the app, so a viewer pressing it repeatedly visibly gets closer to leaving rather than cycling.

Sources is deliberately not here. It lives in Settings: adding a playlist is something a viewer does once, and every position on the bar is one more press between somebody and what they came to watch.

At rest it is the name and a field in the middle of the panel and nothing else — the whole screen says "type something", which is the only thing to do there. Asking a question, or opening Advanced, moves the field to the top and gives the rest of the panel to the answer.

It reuses TvCategoryList whole rather than laying out rows of its own. That is not only economy: that list is the composable measured by the scroll-stability test, and the modifier order inside its poster is the fix for the shake. A second row implementation here would be a second place for it to come back unmeasured.

Not one of the overlays. Nothing is drawn that would have to read a favourite or a resume point before the app knows whose they are — which means no screen below has a state for "no profile" at all.

ProfileGate is the phone's equivalent, doing the same job for the same reason.

The index travels with the item rather than being recovered. Finding it with indexOf meant a linear scan of the whole catalogue on every press — unnoticeable on a short list, and a visible pause on a large one. Grouping records the index in the same pass, so it costs nothing to know.