FOX NOW: Watch TV & Sports

I only redownloaded this app to binge watch The Masked Singer and it buffers and freezes all the time. I have it downloaded to my Xbox One and it’s ALWAYS connected to the wireless no my phone data, and can’t even use it on my iPhone or iPad with or without the wireless, they won’t even open without the spinning circle and doesn’t load. I can only watch 20-25 min of the show with out issues and then it’s every few minutes that it will freeze and then right near the end, it does it every few seconds. Not to mention with the commercials, they freeze as well, and when I get to the end where I want to read the clue at the bottoms of the screen or go back cuz I missed something, you can’t, because it’ll only show the play/pause button and “ad” written inside a circle. This app has so many issues and reading the reviews it seems like they’ve been around for quite awhile. Someone needs fix these issues. This is why I deleted the app before nearly a year or so ago, but forgot when I decided to binge this show, which I can’t find anywhere else. It’s ridiculous. I shouldn’t have to reboot my Xbox every 30 minutes to watch a 40 minute show.

New version of this app on AppleTV is so bad in terms of GUI usability. All it does it lock up and freeze. Finding shows is like fumbling through and just blindly pressing and swiping buttons until you get lucky. Once you’ve actually watched a show, navigating back out and to something else is impossible as the GUI freezes as it tries to buffer and pull data for all the graphics and show previews. Just bad overall and this is on a latest gen AppleTV with latest OS on it that NO OTHER APP HAS ISSUES RUNNING ON LIKE FOX NOW DOES. Fix this last horrible rewrite of the app! To make matters worse, you can’t rewind some shows like The Orville and if you exit the show playback, it requires a FOX Profile to resume without starting from the beginning? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! App is so bad... It also slows down the Home AppleTV GUI when the app has been running for a while and is still in the background. I always have to close the app fully in order to get my 4th gen AppleTV to work smoothly again. Leaving the app opens almost seems like it causes a memory leak or CPU cycles to be used by it in the background when it shouldn’t be.

So I use this app on my iPad and my Apple TV (4th gen). This review addresses both devices. On my Apple TV you cannot pause/resume while watching "live". This is the same on my iPad. If, while watching in "live" mode I choose to "restart", I can pause/resume using iPad, but NOT in Apple TV. With either device while doing a restart of a live show I cannot scrub forward to the current live position of the show. This is VERY annoying! If I'm wanting to restart a live show and then scrub (fast forward) to somewhere in between the start position and the current "live" position I can't. I should be able to! If I stream something previously recorded I can pause/resume a show on both devices. I can scrub forward/backward on my iPad but NOT on my Apple TV. Of course, scrubbing is deactivated during commercial breaks, which is normal for most streaming TV apps. The menu is thoughtfully designed and easy to navigate. It's a better menu implementation then DirecTV NOW, or Sony Playstation VUE, both of which I use on my Apple TV and iPad. If it weren't for the issues mentioned above (inconsistency between devices, pause/resume and scrub niggles) I would have given this app 5 stars. As it is, I gave it 4 stars on iPad and 3 stars on Apple TV.