Increasing app discovery and engagement on Google TV

Posted by Paul Lammertsma, Developer Relations Engineer With over 300 million monthly active devices across Google TV and Android TV, it’s clear that the living room is a massive, distinct platform for apps to accelerate growth. Today, we’re excited to share Google TV features and developer tools designed to increase the discoverability of your content and prepare your app for future TV experiences. Drive discovery and engagement with Gemini Last year, we brought our AI voice assistant, Gemini , to our platform, so that people can easily find what to watch, learn something new on the big screen, and get everyday tasks done with just their voice.

Since launch, we’ve made improvements to how Gemini provides tailored responses to questions. Gemini shares a mix of visuals, videos, and text to help users find what they need, when they need it. For our streaming partners, Gemini is a helpful discovery engine—pulling from your app's metadata to surface your relevant content to viewers.

Declare support for pointing modality The TV experience that we once knew is changing. Gemini is changing the way we discover and stream content with voice, but how we use the remote is evolving, too. Pointer remotes bring motion-controlled input to the big screen, unlocking faster user navigation across the Google TV Home page and within content-heavy apps.

To ensure your app is ready for this shift and provides a great experience for all users, now is the time to start thinking about pointing input. Here’s how to get started: 1. Adapt your TV app UI Library You’ll need support for hover states, scrollable containers, and cursor clicks to enable pointer remote interactions for your app on Google TV.

While implementation varies by UI stack, Jetpack Compose streamlines this transition, as most core components handle these multi-modal interactions natively out of the box. Hover state: Every focusable element on your screen (buttons, movie posters, setting toggles) needs a clear visual feedback mechanism for a hover state. This is often subtler than a focus state but critical for feedback.

Scrollable containers: Pointer remotes will also have a small circular touchpad for scrolling. Users can use this touchpad to scroll up or down, or left or right in your app. Your app will need to respond to touch events to scroll.

” With a pointer remote, a user may “click” on an element that’s not the D-pad focus state, but is instead from a hovered state (similar to a mouse click). 2. Test pointing interactions with a mouse today To see how your app handles hover, scroll, and clicks, simply connect a bluetooth mouse or wired mouse to your Google TV.