Twitch: Live Streaming Ratings and Reviews

It’s so difficult to navigate the app that the older version of the Home Screen is just instagram reels but with live streams on them. I can’t even see the streams I have yet to finish watching and I have to now search the name of the streamer and look for the video I was watching which is sometimes a hassle because to watch older video you have to scroll down all the way and sometimes even miss it because the bar it blends in with the background and thumbnail before I just had to scroll down a bit and boom there was my stream that I haven’t finished watching and I didn’t have to got through an entire process to find one video. I understand what Twitch wanted to do with the layout but it just doesn’t work or either remove it or just add another space in the bottom bar to access this because it really is a great idea what isn’t a great idea tho is to eliminate the Home Screen that has worked so well for the app scrap it and add an entire new UI that you can’t go anywhere with it just isn’t practical. On another note you can make the viewer choose how they want the UI to look like and make it more practical for every individual viewer and put it to their taste then you don’t have any problems with UI issues in the first place because they can just change how they want it to look like and that is a much better update to make.

I think twitch is cool and different than other platforms. I have a couple channels that I follow and browse some others that peak my interest occasionally. There are some issues that I have with it tho. When you open the app, the first thing you see are other channels that are being promoted or match who you are currently following. The channels you follow are at the bottom and you have to scroll all the way down just to get to them. Put the ones I’m following at the top for quick access, please. Also, I understand that the app is for ages 17+ but when you open the app and the channels that are being promoted show up, I’d rather not have a bunch of pages of girls with every part of their anatomy hanging out as the first thing you see. A good 2/3 of the channels are like this. I don’t even follow channels like them; just some gaming channels and a couple where the women actually wear all their clothes and talk about everyday life. Yet they are spread all over my front page in string bikinis in hot tubs. I’d rather not open the app and look like some creep who views those kinds of adult channels when I don’t. It’s like you have to open the app with your phone or tablet covered in case there’s someone else looking by mistake. Maybe I’ll look through the app and see if I can fix things myself or hopefully the app is updated in the future.

A bug still exists that has for a long time where when in dark mode, certain movements or actions can cause the app to switch to light mode, which takes a long time and 4 menu pages to flip through to turn it back on which is inconvenient and slightly annoying.

Another issue exists that when you are watching a stream in full screen mode and you double tap to open chat, and you click on a chatter’s name, a menu will pop up that allows you to gift them a sub, or look at their info etc. The problem is that when this menu pops up when in fullscreen (phone sideways), there’s no way to close the menu; you can’t click anywhere to get rid of the menu as it takes up the entire screen, and the only way to close it is to flip your device and go back to non-fullscreen, tap anywhere outside of the menu, and it’ll close. Again, this is an issue that has a solution but requires a lot of time spent to undo which can be annoying for users. A simple fix would be to add a close button for this menu, both in fullscreen and non-fullscreen.

Similar to the last issue, when you tap on emotes in chat, the only way to close the menu is to click outside the menu which can be difficult/inconvenient. The same solution exists where all that is needed for this problem is to add exit buttons to menus.

It seems like Twitch is playing around with their UI layout, however this new one is not intuitive and hard to navigate. When you open the app, a random livestream starts play, just one and you have to swipe each stream one by one to even see the thumbnails or what they’re doing. You cannot pause them or turn them off. When I go to see the entire list of who is live, I can no longer see the thumbnail or title of the stream, only the name of the stream and the game they’re playing. There is NO WAY to quickly see all the titles and thumbnails of the all of the livestreams anymore. There is also no longer a “suggested streamer” category, which concerns me cause that was a main way that smaller stream could easily be found on the main page and now the main page is just a preview of a single random livestream, with no easy or good way to be able to preview all of my live followed channels and have a way to quickly see “suggested livestreams” section. It’s completely missing, replaced with this strange tiktok-esque scrolling, which is no way to quickly or easily preview multiple stream at one time. The old UI was way more intuitive and easier to use and navigate. This new one is a completely mess and it’s now impossible to quickly even see what the stream is about. I’m barely getting any information and I have to basically click through and guess which stream is doing what. Please reimplement the old UI or a similar version of it

Home page is essentially useless if you just want to see what your favorite streamer is up to. Twitch will say just look at your follow list but the only information available is the game or category they are doing. It was nice having a preview of their title or thumbnail for a quick glance to see what they are up to. Having to scroll through the home feed to see who and what they are streaming is so much more inconvenient that it previously was. Previously you could see multiple previews of the streams at once and what they are doing where as now you only get one. From my perspective it's pointless to even scroll through the home page because it is what Twitch's algorithm wants us to see, not what I want to see. If they wanted to add this current home page layout to the app they could have just added it to the discovery page on the previous version because that's what the home page has become. So also because of this new layout, if you do want to browse twitch home page, if you are watching a stream and minimize it, it automatically pauses which is quite annoying. I don't know what the thought process behind this design was, but if it was to try and keep people more engaged with the app and discover other streamers, I think it has done the opposite,at least in my case, because now I just look at my follow list and close the app if there's nobody I want to watch.

I love the streamers I watch on twitch. I’m going to watch them regardless of my experience, but the experience can definitely cause frustration when it’s not working. There’s been a lot of headaches (annoyances) over the years on the mobile app and each update that would bring features also seemed to bring some annoying bugs. I say this as someone who will use this app most of my waking hours. Even at work or on a commute I’ll have it running but be listening in only. I’ve realized that the annoyances I’ve been having have significantly improved. I no longer feel like Im missing out by not watching from my PC. Picture on picture mode was a huge improvement. Im not stuck having to stop listening/watching when i need to multitask. Low latency mode brought to mobile no longer makes me feel behind the community in the chat. Ability to do sound only mode is excellent for lower connection areas (perfect while I’m driving!) and even when bugs come with new updates twitch is actually making some quick fixes now. I’m impressed. For years it felt like the app was an afterthought. They’ve turned a new leaf everyone!

I tried stalling the update after seeing what was involved, but I could only delay it so long. The most recent update introduced buttons on the side of the screen, and chat on the bottom of the screen when in horizontal viewing. I cannot find a way to toggle this feature off, so it is just stuck there. Twitch probably figured that having these buttons here would increase interactions by making it easier, but instead it’s driving me away from the app.

The problem is that video games, the primary media viewed on twitch, already make heavy use of the sides of the screen. The HUD for video games, and any sort of informative overlay in esports use the sides and bottom to convey important information so that they don’t interfere with the main components of the game. And now, Twitch has decided that on mobile, their stuff is more important than the piece of media I am trying to consume.

This isn’t an ad that ends after time. This isn’t interactivity that goes after not touching the screen for a bit. These are bits/cheers/messages that sit on the screen the entire time, preventing me from seeing the stuff I want to see. If you’re gonna fundamentally alter how users can interact with your platform, at least give us the option to turn it off. If not, I’m probably gonna stop using the app. What’s the point if I can’t see the the game?

The new update has made using the app an absolute chore. The first thing I did was turn auto play off. The ui is ugly and unintuitive. The “following” tab floats in a weird part of the screen, it should just be on the bar with all the other things I actually use. I don’t like that the clips section doesn’t show me people I follow. I don’t like that it’s mimicking tiktok when I use Twitch for a completely different entertainment purpose. It doesn’t make sense to have a stream autoplay but then have to take extra steps to actually get to the stream+chat, when half the point of watching streams is to interact via chat with the streamer. I tried to give the update a chance but it’s just so miserable to use as a watcher. As for the stream manager, it doesn’t make sense for the “quick actions” to not be immediately accessible, the point is that they are quick. Having to toggle over to the quick actions before you can even choose your action defeats the purpose.

I’m sure this update was released knowing that there would be instant feedback, so I can only hope that the development team is ready to make immediate changes based on all the feedback I’ve seen in other reviews. This is Twitch, not Tiktok, and when so many of us are here to watch long-form content it makes absolutely zero sense to switch to an app style that was made for binging short form videos. Clips and Tiktok videos are not the same thing.

When I first opened the app with my phone on silent and a stream started playing out loud, I thought I had accidentally tapped on something. I frantically tapped to pause it, and instead it took me right to that person's stream. Overwhelmed, I exited out of the app and the stream followed me PiP still playing something I didn’t want to watch. I’m not even sure how to use this app anymore. It is the most unintuitive app design and UI I’ve ever seen on an impressive level. Without exaggeration, I cannot think of another app I’ve had this reaction to. Not sure where the idea to use short-form (vertical) content style scrolling with long-form content (horizontal) came from. People aren’t streaming in the same overly-engaging style that’s required of quick scrolling discovery. Like, this change was worked on by many people and was signed off on at many levels, and they all thought “ahhh yes, this is the future of streaming!”? Devs, If you’re really sticking to your guns with this change, at least make it so I’m not startled by immediate audio while just trying to see if people I follow are live. I really do hope you are able to make some quality of life adjustments (or even better, make this as a additional explore feature within the old UI if you must) so we can continue to watch our creators, big and small, on your platform.

The new layout is awful, it genuinely makes the app worse to use. The old layout was very useful and there was no need to change it. When I open the app I want to know who is live of the streamers I follow and get recommendations from there I don’t want to immediately jump into a stream.

To make matters worse when scrolling through the live stream it doesn’t automatically follow you followers list when scrolling through and instead just jumps through random live streams when swiping. Until the UI is either reverted back or they make improvements to make it useful in the way it once was for now I’ll be using the app exclusively on iPad as the UI hasn’t changed on the iPad version of the app.

I wish companies would actually think before rolling out these types of changes especially when it seems like no one was asking for them. Amazon’s quest to make Twitch a profitable branch of the business just continues to make the service worse and worse. Between ads that disrupt the live content, not paying partners/affiliates a fair percentage and taking a genuinely useful app and making it borderline unusable it’s no wonder Twitch has yet to turn a profit for Mr. Bezos try doing things right instead of what you think shareholders want and guess what profit will follow.