Get started with 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, which means you can create new TV apps based on what you already know about building apps for Android. Or you can 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. To make your app successful on TVs, design new layouts that viewers can enjoy from 10 feet away and comfortably navigate 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.

Topics

Create and run a TV app
Create a new Android Studio project for TV apps or modify your existing app project to run on TV devices.
Handle TV hardware
Check if your app is running on TV hardware, handle unsupported hardware features, and manage controller devices.
Manage TV controllers
Handle user input by managing TV controllers.
Build TV UIs
Use Compose for TV to build modern, declarative UIs for TV apps.
Create TV navigation
Understand the requirements for TV navigation and how to implement TV-compatible navigation.