Tizen apps are the best apps. Fight me
Everyone online (reddit, YT comments, AVS Forum, you name it) loves to talk crap about Tizen and how "unusable" the native apps are. Well, I'm here to be its sole defender. I've been using an S90C for over 2 years now. And the Tizen apps provide the best functionality; even IF they still may ultimately not be the BEST option. Let me explain.
I've used this TV's native apps in addition to a Roku, a Google TV Streamer, and currently an Apple TV 4K. They ALL come with some sort of compromise to core app functionality that the native apps don't have. I'll cover a couple areas of key findings in my experience with all these devices.
INTERFACE/UI:
Roku and Google TV aren't really better interfaces at all. They are similarly inconsistent in performance as Tizen (lag/frame drops in menu navigation). Roku's interface in addition, has a cheap, low res appearance to it. Both the Roku and Google Streamer are similarly ad based, but the Google Streamer is the most annoying. Both Google and Tizen feature an ad banner at the top of their respective home screens. On Tizen, it doesn't bother me much. Why? Because once you navigate down to get away from the ad banner, you stay there. If I go to, say, YouTube for instance and watch a video; when I back out of YouTube to switch to a different app, Tizen will spit me right back into the apps bar. On the Google Streamer it spits you back to the top with the ad banner EVERY TIME YOU QUIT AN APP. This is infuriating not just because they're forcing you to view ads every time you go home, but it takes 2 or 3 clicks every time to get back to your apps row. This alone made Google TV a no-go for me. Apple's UI also is not the perfection that everyone tries to claim. While it is indeed the MOST smooth in terms of navigation, it does hiccup from time to time. It is ad free which is nice, but honestly not a huge improvement for me vs Tizen because the ads there were as non-intrusive as possible. The big issue with Apple's UI are their HDR settings and content matching settings being complete nonsense and poorly implemented. They have an HDR toggle switch that makes it seem like it has to be enabled in order to get HDR of any type whatsoever but that isn't the case. Having HDR toggled on makes the AppleTV force everything into HDR, including all of the natively SDR UIs. One would think the "match dynamic range" setting would fix this(showing SDR UI/content in SDR and showing HDR UI/content in HDR) but that setting only does anything once actual content is playing. This is bad because, again using YouTube as an example, while you're browsing the YT UI it's forcing that SDR experience into an HDR container. Hit play on a video and there's a long black screen while the ATV switches from its unnecessary HDR output to the correct SDR output and reestablishes HDMI handshake. And when you stop a video you get the same black screen while it does that process in reverse. And while one would think that disabling the HDR setting would stop all HDR content from playing in HDR, it actually DOESN'T! Oh, EXCEPT for the (actually nice) aerials screensaver videos that play. Those, inexplicably, DO require the HDR setting to be engaged lol. So, overall in that regard it is possible to get the ATV behaving in a mostly correct manner, you have to go against intuition in the settings to achieve that. Whoever designed these settings should be fired, honestly. Oh yeah, and Apple's on screen keyboard IS THE WORST. It is truly one of the dumbest bits of UI design I've experienced in recent memory.
Apps/Functionality:
On Roku I could never get video output(motion) to look quite right and the overall experience didn't feel any better than Tizen so I dismissed that device pretty quickly after setting it up. The Google TV Streamer experienced issues with jerky video playback in apps at first. I discovered that, at least for my setup, this issue was caused by the streamer defaulting to a 60fps output. Selecting 59.94fps resolved that issue, EXCEPT for within the Apple TV+ app. That app experienced frame drops every 45-60 seconds or so and I could not resolve that issue. The YouTube app on this device also had buggy HDR playback for certain videos. Ironic considering that's a Google platform. Google Streamer supports HDR10+ on Netflix, Prime Video, ATV+, but not hulu/D+ like the Tizen app does. But with the Google Streamer, the ATV+ issue along with ads were deal breakers. So, on to the ATV 4K. All apps playback smoothly, the issue comes with HDR support. HDR10+ only currently works with Prime video. ATV+(the app) SUPPORTS HDR10+ but it is hilariously currently broken on Apple's own hardware. Supposedly this was broken with the last TVOS update and who knows when/if it will be fixed. Netflix will not support HDR10+ on this device because it lacks AV1 codec support. Which also means that streaming quality in general also is not as good it could be. Both Netflix and YouTube began rolling out AV1 to improve image quality. ATV misses out on this.
Conclusion:
Tizen's app suite is the most fully featured manner to experience all of these streaming apps. None of the apps have playback issues. The newer AV1 video codec is supported providing better video quality with more efficient data usage in apps that support it. HDR10+ functions in all apps that support it. It all just works pretty well.
So why then, after all of this typing and defending of Tizen's apps, am I sticking with an Apple TV? Three letters: CEC. Samsung's integration of CEC is completely ridiculous and makes it basically impossible for me to set up my universal remote for reliable activity activation and switching. That functionality is important for me because I have a non AV-savvy partner who I want to be able to just pick up a single remote and with one button press do whatever she wants to do on our setup. Samsung's CEC unfortunately interferes with that goal. So here I am, defending their apps while ultimately still not being able to use them myself lol. Either way, people should chill out with all the Tizen slander. The apps themselves are pretty good