tvOS Pathway

Get started with this easy-to-navigate collection of videos, documentation, and tools to build great apps and games.

    Get to know tvOS

    Create apps for the biggest screen in the home. Deliver an enhanced television experience to people in any room of the house. With tvOS, your content is experienced in high-quality formats such as 4K video, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and HDR10. Stream the latest entertainment, sports, or news content. Offer a great game or education experience, or deliver personal training sessions from a fitness app.

    Assemble your toolbox

    Xcode offers the tools you need to develop, test, and distribute apps for all Apple platforms, including intelligent code completion, simulators for Apple devices, advanced profiling and debugging tools, and more.

    Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language for all Apple platforms. It’s easy to get started using Swift, with a concise-yet-expressive syntax and modern features you’ll love. Swift code is safe by design and produces software that runs lightning‑fast.

    SwiftUI

    SwiftUI helps you build great-looking apps across all Apple platforms with the power of Swift — and surprisingly little code.

    TVUIKit and UIKit

    TVUIKit and UIKit offer a library of objects for building your app’s UI and infrastructure. Develop your app experience through storyboards or programmatically in your code.

    Dive into design

    An app that offers an engaging experience keeps people coming back. To create this, your app should have an appealing UI, intuitive interactions, an easy-to-understand layout, and emphasis on the right content throughout.

    To begin the design process, we recommend familiarizing yourself with Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). The HIG offers invaluable information on how to design your app’s interface, navigate content, and manage interactions. We also encourage you to explore the relevant Apple Design Resources.

    And if you’re looking for inspiration, check out these great foundational design videos:

    The qualities of great design

    Essential design principles

    Dark Mode

    Build your app with an interface that harmonizes with the appearance of tvOS. As room lighting changes, users can effortlessly switch from a light to dark appearance by simply turning Dark Mode on or off. Plus, accessibility settings for high-contrast UI can make it easier for everyone to see your apps.

    Scenes

    Scenes are a crucial part of the infrastructure you use to manage your app’s interface. A scene coordinates interactions between your UI and the rest of your app. Scenes also respond to notifications that affect your UI, such as transitions between foreground and background execution.

    Automatic layout

    SwiftUI adopts automatic layout as part of its UI design approach, which allows you to accommodate different TV sizes, aspect ratios, and resolutions relative to the current safe areas.

    Scalable images

    Incorporate SF Symbols to make your app more adaptable to changes. The SF Symbols app offers a vast collection of configurable, vector-based images that adapt naturally to appearance and size changes. They also blend well with the San Francisco system font, resulting in a consistent look across Apple platforms.

    Adopt best practices

    Make sure your app offers the best possible experience for everyone by keeping these practices in mind:

    Prioritize privacy

    At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right. Access user or device data only with the user’s informed consent obtained in accordance with applicable law. In addition, take appropriate steps to protect user and device data, and be transparent about how you use it. If you collect data, offer a privacy statement that explains what you collect and how you use that information.

    Secure the data you collect and store

    If you do collect data, make sure you protect that data from malicious attacks. Adopt passkeys as a secure alternative to passwords. Store personally identifiable information, financial data, or other sensitive data in the user’s encrypted keychain.

    Audit your accessibility support

    Apple builds accessibility support right into its technologies, but screen readers and other accessibility features rely on information your app provides. SwiftUI and UIKit can describe each piece of your UI, but only you know how those pieces work together. Review accessibility labels and other descriptions to make sure they provide helpful information, and make sure focus-based navigation is simple and intuitive.

    Internationalize and localize your app

    Embrace a global market by localizing your app for other regions and languages. Prepare your app using the Foundation framework, which provides code to format strings, dates, times, currencies, and numbers for different languages and regions. Ensure your UI looks good for both left-to-right and right-to-left languages. Localize app resources and add them to your Xcode project.

    Design for everyone

    Consider social and cultural differences when developing content, and avoid images and terms that have negative or derogatory connotations for portions of your audience.

    Test and debug your app thoroughly

    During the development cycle, debug problems as they arise using the built-in Xcode debugger.

    Optimize performance

    Identify bottlenecks and other performance issues in your code using the Instruments app that comes with Xcode. Profile your running code, find memory leaks, analyze resource usage, and much more.

    Build for multiple Apple platforms

    Reuse SwiftUI views and UI on all Apple platforms

    You can reuse nearly all of your app’s structural and data-based code on any Apple platform. The universal availability of SwiftUI makes it an ideal choice for development, and reduces the time it takes to deliver custom versions of your app on different platforms.

    Build with the tvOS SDK and SwiftUI

    With the tvOS SDK, you can leverage frameworks, such as UIKit, AVKit, and Metal, to create rich games and apps that look amazing on the big screen. Take advantage of system features, including AVPlayer, Sidebar, and User Management, to get the most out of your streaming media apps. And you can use SwiftUI to easily port over your iOS or iPadOS apps to tvOS.

    Migrate your TVML app to SwiftUI

    Distribute your app

    Distribute your app or game on 175 storefronts on the App Store. Choose from a variety of business models, including free, freemium (free with optional In-App Purchases), paid, and more. Select your business model early in your app development to better provide people with a great app experience.

    Go further

    Once you have your app up and running, look for additional ways to improve the experience for your users. Little things can make a big difference, whether it’s adding a particular feature, or presenting your content in a different way.