HBO Max knows its app is a mess

Vulture

"They’re well aware of the issues plaguing the user experience and have been scrambling to fix things," explains Josef Adalian. "The biggest problems with the Apple interface were addressed within weeks, and a company source tells me the remaining errors should be corrected within days. As for Roku users, the company put out a statement at the end of July admitting the 'experience on Roku devices isn’t at the quality level we want and our users expect' and promising the platform was 'hard at work on resolving these issues.' Fixing the problems is taking time, however, and a senior WarnerMedia exec tells me the social-media commentary surrounding the Max app’s summer snafus has been 'super painful' to take in. He also admits that, in this case at least, it’s not just a matter of People Whining on Twitter. 'We see the crash logs,' he says. 'We’re not blind to it.'" Adalian adds that went wrong "is that the current app wasn’t built from scratch the way Netflix or Hulu were brought to life. Instead, Max has been running on a retrofitted version of the old HBO Go and HBO Now services. While those were both solid applications, they were designed for a very different product. According to the WarnerMedia exec, the main concern of the engineers then was making sure everything didn’t crash when hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously streamed Game of Thrones on a Sunday night."