Aamir Siddiqui / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Android TV currently offers a Discover tab for getting recommendations and building your watchlist.
- A new update to the system launcher suggests that Google’s planning to drop Discover and move your watchlist to the Home tab.
- Confusingly, Google’s messaging in the app suggest that this change was supposed to take place in July.
What does your usage of Android TV look like? Google’s big-screen entertainment platform certainly tries to act as a hub that not just organizes all your streaming options in one place, but helps steer you in the direction of what you might want to check out next. Are you taking advantage of that, though, checking in on the Discover tab to get some recommendations from Google? Or are you more likely to dive right in to your favorite streaming app itself, and learn about what’s new on a service-by-service basis?
We wonder just how many users fall into that latter camp — and Google probably has been too, as the company seems to be getting ready to kill off Discover as we know it.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
At least, Google sure looks like it was getting ready to put an end to the Discover tab in Android TV. We’re just a little less than sure if that plan is still in motion.
Looking over the changes in Google’s 7.1.7-787904429-f update for the Android TV Home app — basically the Android TV launcher that provides the base UI — we’ve identified some new text strings that reference plans to remove Discover:
Code
<string name="discover_deprecation_critical_notification_description">Your recommendations and watchlist will move to the “Home” tab.</string>
<string name="discover_deprecation_critical_notification_title">The Discover tab is going away soon</string>The Home tab can already function as a reasonable enough tool for finding new content, especially when you add a few channel rows for your favorite apps. Consolidating Discover recommendations there makes enough sense if Google’s looking to clean up some of Android TV’s sprawl, and bringing the watchlist along sounds just fine.
Considering how straightforward those strings read, where’s our confusion coming from? Well, we also found these new strings:
Code
<string name="dt_deprecation_full_screen_critical_notification_description">The Discover tab was removed in July 2025. Also, customise your recommendation is on Home tab</string>
<string name="dt_deprecation_full_screen_critical_notification_title">Your watchlist have moved to Home tab</string>Today marks the start of August, and we’re still seeing the Discover tab on all the Android TV devices we checked. More than that, we haven’t yet seen the “going away soon” message displayed, which sure seems intended to give users a bit of a heads-up in advance of the removal.
For the moment, color us a little confused about Google’s intentions here. Perhaps plans to kill Discover have already been canceled, but this unused code still managed to sneak in to a public build. Or maybe Discover really will be going away, but Google’s had to push its timetable back a little.
We’ll keep an eye out for any further Android TV updates that might shed more light on the company’s plans.
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