Android TV has a healthy lead over Apple, but one rival remains untouchable

Android and Apple have spent many years battling for your pocket, but the contest looks rather different on the biggest screen in your home. New survey data suggests Android TV is used on considerably more primary US television setups than Apple TV, although both remain some distance behind Roku and Amazon Fire TV.

The figures come from Hub Entertainment Research’s latest “Evolution of the TV Set” survey, as reported by The Streamable. When respondents were asked which operating system runs on their most-used TV or streaming player, 14% named Android TV, compared with 8% for Apple’s tvOS. That first figure presumably includes devices that use the Google TV interface, which is built on the Android TV OS and wasn’t listed separately in the results.

That puts Google’s platform in third place and comfortably ahead of Apple TV. However, Roku alone accounted for 37% of respondents’ main setups, while Fire TV added another 17%. Together, the two leading platforms were used by more than half of those surveyed, so Android still has plenty of living rooms left to conquer.

The survey also suggests that viewers care more about reaching something worth watching than being endlessly told what they might like. 60% said easy search was the most important feature when looking for a new program, compared with 31% who prioritized personalized recommendations.

That doesn’t mean viewers see no role for AI. 28% said its most useful job would be removing recommendations they probably wouldn’t enjoy, while 27% wanted it to generate new personalized suggestions. Given how cluttered some modern TV home screens have become, an AI that simply makes fewer bad guesses might be the easier sell. Perhaps that’s easier said than done.