Build 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.

Note: TV apps run locally on TV devices. To learn more about streaming video and audio from an Android app to a TV device, refer to the developer documentation for Google Cast.

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

Get 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.
Handle TV hardware
Learn how to check if your app is running on TV hardware, handle unsupported hardware features, and manage controller devices.
Manage TV controllers
Learn how to handle user input by managing TV controllers.
Build TV layouts
Learn the minimum requirements for TV layouts and how to implement them.
Create TV navigation
Learn the requirements for TV navigation and how to implement TV-compatible navigation.