Freezes, crashes, glitchy subtitles, stubborn fast-forward and rewind controls: Those are just some of the troubles that streamers have reported with the HBO Max app across a variety of platforms, and patience has been wearing thin.
Well, good news: An all-new version of the HBO Max—one that promises to squash the annoying playback bugs—is in the works.
Vulture reports that within the next “four or five” months, HBO Max will roll out revamps for all of its connected TV apps, starting with Roku and PlayStation. That’s great news for Roku users who, as Vulture notes, have dealt with the most HBO Max issues.
Meanwhile, Apple TV users probably won’t see a new HBO Max app until closer to the end of the year, according to Vulture. There’s no precise word on when Amazon Fire TV or Google TV streamers would get the new app, although presumably they’d still fall within that four to six-month window.
Subscribers have been grousing about the HBO Max app for months, and for good reason. “Oops! Something went wrong” screens are common occurrences, as well as bugs when trying to fast forward, rewind, or “scrubbing” through a video. Skipping to the next episode can also be buggy, while some Roku users have resorted to elaborate workarounds just so they could watch anything at all without a crash.
While some of the issues with the HBO Max app emerged following the arrival of the streamer’s new, $10-a-month ad-supported tier, the major problem was that the app was essentially a “retrofitted” version of the aging HBO Go and HBO Now apps, Vulture says. With HBO Max offering far more content to a wider variety of regions than HBO Go or HBO Now ever did, the hybrid HBO Max app simply wasn’t up to snuff.
Of course, once the new HBO Max app finally does arrive, it won’t be perfect, and users can likely expect another round of glitches and bug fixes. But hopefully, HBO Max subscribers will soon be able to press “Play” and consistently start streaming. That’s not too much to ask, right?