With over 300 million monthly active devices on Google TV and Android TV, it’s clear that the living room is a huge, niche 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.
Promote discovery and connection with Gemini
Last year, we introduced our AI voice assistant, Geminion our platform, so people can easily find what to watch, learn something new on the big screen, and perform everyday tasks with just their voice.
Since launch, we have created Improvement How Gemini provides tailored answers 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 search engine – delivering your relevant content to viewers from your app’s metadata.
Declare support for pointing methods
The TV experience as we knew it is changing. Gemini is changing the way we search and stream content with voice, but how we use the remote is also evolving.
Pointer remotes bring motion-controlled input to the big screen, unlocking faster user navigation through the Google TV home page and within content-heavy apps. To make sure your app is ready for this change and delivers a great experience for all users, now is the time to start thinking about pointing input. Here’s how to get started:
1. Customize 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 of the core components handle these multi-modal interactions natively out of the box.
- Hover Position: Every focusable element on your screen (button, movie poster, setting toggle) needs a clear visual feedback mechanism for the hover state. This is often more subtle than focus position but is important for feedback.
- Scrollable Container: The Pointer remote 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 in order to scroll.
- Cursor click: Many TV apps today expect a simple D-pad OK button “click”. With the pointer remote, the user can “click” on an element that is not the D-pad focus position, but from a hovered position (similar to a mouse click).
2. Test pointing interaction with the mouse today
Simply connect a Bluetooth mouse or wired mouse to your Google TV to see how your app handles hover, scroll, and clicks. Keep in mind that mouse control is more precise, as users are closer to the screen and usually keep the mouse in a stationary position. Pointer remotes can often be less accurate, as users are sometimes as far as 10 feet from the screen, and making rude gestures with the remote from their couch. As a TV designer or developer, you can mitigate this lack of input precision by placing larger hover targets for elements.
3. Announce TV app support for Pointer Remote on Google Play
Finally, tell Google Play that your TV app is designed to work with the pointer. This ensures that users with the pointer remote will be able to easily find, install, and interact with your app.
Within your AndroidManifest.xml, declare the meta-data tag, android.software.leanback.support_touch. This tag informs the platform that your TV app “spatially supports touch”, as the pointer remotely simulates touch events.
AndroidManifest.xml
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Tips:
- android.software.lean back The feature declaration indicates that your app supports D-pad navigation and is for distribution on TV devices through Google Play only.
- New software feature of android.software.leanback.support_touch Announces that in addition to the D-pad, you’ve made sure that your TV app works well for pointer/cursor experiences via mouse (today’s) and pointer remote (the future).
- If you haven’t already, now is the time to adopt jetpack compose. Hover, scroll, and click are common input modalities that are supported on a variety of form factors, and building your app with an adaptive UI framework enables code reusability and low maintenance.
Onboard the Engage SDK
The Engage SDK, formerly known as the Video Discovery API, optimizes resumes, entitlements, and recommendations across all Google TV form factors to drive app discovery and engagement.
- Restart: Partners can easily display a user’s paused video in the ‘Continue watching’ row from the home page.
- Eligibility: The Engage SDK streamlines entitlement management, matching app content to user entitlements. Users appreciate this because they can enjoy personalized recommendations without having to manually update all their subscription details. This allows partners to connect with users across multiple discovery points on Google TV.
- Recommendations: The Engage SDK also highlights personalized recommendations based on the content users view inside apps.
Now is a good time to start onboarding the Engage SDK, as the legacy Watch Next API, which is powering your Continuous Watch 1.0 experience, will lose support in the second half of 2027. To get started, go here goo.gle/engage-tv To know more.
We’re excited to see how our latest Gemini experience and developer tools will optimize your search and drive user engagement on our platform.
Check out this announcement and all the Google I/O 2026 updates io.google.
