Apple Lock Screen Scrubber Rewind

Channels Apple TV
#1

Hello,

So long story short, there’s a user in my family who had a double hand amputation. Instead, they have stumps. When at home, it’s easiest just to not use prosthetics.

I use channels because I’ve found it pretty easy to set up voice control via Siri to do the basics. Mainly, we need to turn the TV on and off, and change channel. The API and Siri Shortcuts make this possible.

The user uses their phone a ton. However, they occasionally accidentally press the scrubber bar on the Lock Screen. If you press the scrubber, it rewinds Channels all the way to the beginning.

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Is there a way to disable the scrubber from doing this? It’s really inconvenient, and, given the stumps, there’s very limited precision on the phone. Someone with fingers would never make this mistake… but with the stumps it’s much harder.

Thanks!

#2

Is this with a recording or Live TV?

#3

Live TV.

#4

I've been able to reproduce this issue. It doesn't look like this is a straight forward fix for us to make so we'll have to brainstorm more what it is we could do.

1 Like
#5

Thanks for the fast reply!

I’d be totally fine with an option to just disable pay/pause/rewind. That’d be my quick-and-dirty fix.

Or the scrubber could just move to Live instead of restart at beginning. Honestly, Live makes more sense.

1 Like
#6

The problem is we don't have direct control over those controls. All we get is a message from iOS saying, "the user told the system to ask the app to seek to time 0 (the start)".

We'll keep looking into what we can do to make this better.

#7

I figured. Thus, just having an option to ignore that would work.

On a side note, back to the API. …

There are two confusing things on this page:

  1. The port number in the examples is 8089, but really it should be 57000.
  2. For the POST /api/channel/:number , :number doesn’t have to be an integer. DTV channels like “ 32.1” work as well.
#8

Thanks for catching that! I've updated the API docs to use the correct port.

You're totally right. I've updated that too.

#9

I dont know if this would help or not, or whether this was already tried, but in the iphone and ipad under accessibility, there is a setting under

Settings -> Accessibility -> Touch Accommodations -> hold duration.

Perhaps this might have the lock screen reject accidental hits on the scroll bar if you increase the recognition delay?

#10

I sort of have an “old dog, new trick” problem. That totally changes everything and how long button pressing takes. They have problems unlocking phone in that mode. The swipe up gesture is harder.

#11

After digging into the code further I was able to figure out that we weren't setting all of the things that we could to let iOS know that it was Live TV being watched.

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If you download the latest Testflight beta, it will behave better and ignore taps when watching Live TV. You'll need the beta installed on your Apple TV.

You can join our TestFlight beta program by visiting Channels — Beta Program from an iPhone or iPad and then downloading the TestFlight app on your Apple TV.

3 Likes
#12

Wow. Thanks! I’ll try it tomorrow.

#13

Actually … I tried very quickly on my TV. Worked perfectly.

How quickly would you expect it would take to put this in the production version? In retrospect, I’d have to edit the shortcuts to change the “Open App on Apple TV” step to open the Beta version of the app, then change back after you release.

And I’m lazy :blush:

If you’re likely to release maybe within a few weeks, I’ll wait for problem to resolve itself.

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#14

We try to do a release every month or so but sometimes it goes longer.