The disney+ app, really sucks.
I have an Android device that hosts the app and I only every play on the chromecast. To be clear, I use a chromecast on a TV with CEC enabled. That is, you can send commands from your remote to connected devices. This is really nice, you can pauze, play, stop, rewind, toggle subtitles. And you can skip ahead, and back. There is even a button to accept things.
This works really well when you stream Netflix to the chromecast. Play, pauze, stop, it will keep the app active, and actually work. I can enable and disable subtitles, I can skip ahead and back, and I can accept things like ‘skip intro’ or ‘play next episode’.
I thought all of the streaming apps would work like that. But no. Disney+ is bad. It starts when you hit the ‘stream on chromecast button’, it is slow, but after 10 seconds your TV starts playing from the chromecast and plays a Disney animation, including sound (I don’t like that it always has to play sounds, but maybe netflix had that as well?).
Alright let’s play something with the remote from the TV, nope, can’t do. You have to use the app… All of the controls, except pause/play are through the android app. Enable subtitles? nope. skip preview? nope. Hitting the ‘stop’ button on your remote? Blam! the app stops playing on the chromecast. You have to reconnect and go through the motions and increasingly annoying startup animation again. Did you pause, and not touch the app for ~ 10 minutes? Chromecast disconnects. Oh and it also does not remember where you were in the episode half of the time.
You might say, but why don’t you use the ‘native’ smart tv app? Because those suck even more! my TV is old, they started to add ads, and it had gotten so many issues that I disconnected the internet on the TV, and my TV viewing life is so much better. The chromecast is ideal, it just works (so there is a pretty good change that Google will kill it in all of their wisdom)!
There are some good parts, because Disney owns Star Wars now, everything Star Wars is bundeled into a different screen. I had the option to see all Star Wars material in order of time, or only the Darth Vader story. etc. That is pretty cool. Oh wait, the order in time thing is gone again a few days later.
So the Disney plus app sucks has a lot of opportunity to improve.