Apple TV+ is a streaming service that should have definite appeal to fans of prestige TV. With shows like “Severance,” “Ted Lasso,” “The Studio,” “Acapulco,” and many more high-quality titles calling Apple TV+ home — each packed with A-list stars — the harvest of great TV shows and original movies you’ll reap with an Apple TV+ subscription is rich indeed.

But once you’re inside Apple TV+, does the streamer’s user interface make it easy to discover your next favorite? Or is it more of a challenge than some other streamers make it to find a new obsession? I flipped on my Fire TV to check out the Apple TV+ user interface for myself, and I’ll score the experience for curious readers below.

See scores for the Apple TV+ user interface

Does Apple TV+ have a good home page?

One thing I want to give Apple TV+ credit for right away: it puts the Continue Watching row right near the top. Of course, the streamer has a carousel of new and upcoming seasons of TV and other titles that it wants to steer audiences toward first, and this row autoplays trailers without giving the viewer much recourse to stop them — though you can mute them.

After this carousel, however, Apple TV+ doesn’t try to hide your Continue Watching row under two or three other sets of tiles. They’re right up top, letting you get back to your last stream faster instead of having to scrounge around for it. That’s always something I value in a streamer’s home page, as I usually want to come back to something I was watching previously when I open the app.

After that, however, the Apple TV+ home screen gets decidedly uncreative in a hurry. Partly, this is because there just isn’t that much in the Apple TV+ library just yet; since the streamer still primarily offers a catalog of its own original shows and movies, there isn’t a ton of volume to present customers with up front. There’s only so many ways to show viewers the same shows over and over again, so I understand why many hf the content rows on Apple TV+ seem so pro forma.

Standard, rather bland options like Top 10 TV shows, Emmy nominees, New Releases, and Must-See Hits are available in abundance as you scroll down, but there’s no sense that Apple TV+ has an algorithm like Netflix’s that works really hard to learn more about your viewing preferences and habits. It’s not a bad home page, it just doesn’t have any real magic to it either.

Home page score: 7 out of 10

Is content discovery easy on Apple TV+?

Another advantage of a smaller catalog on Apple TV+ is that content discovery should be easier, at least in theory. Apple TV+ doesn’t make this too painful; once you scroll down a few rows on the home page, you’ll see an option to browse by category, and the shows you’re most likely to come to Apple TV+ to watch at a given time are all presented multiple times on the home screen.

The search function is right at the top of the left-hand menu, and using it will again allow you to browse by category or type in the specific name of the show or movie you want to watch. All in all, I didn’t see content discovery as an issue on Apple TV+, even if there’s nothing special about the process either.

Content discovery score: 8 out of 10

How easy is it to move between categories on Apple TV+?

Apple TV+ doesn’t have a huge selection of live sports, but it does still host the “Friday Night Baseball” package from Major League Baseball. It may need to do a better job of advertising games, though admittedly, I didn’t write this review while games were in process, so there’s a good probability that Apple TV+ does indeed make it easy to jump to baseball when it’s live.

However, I found that I had to click the Search tab to find “Friday Night Baseball” content on Apple TV+; there was no tab for it on the home screen or in the left-hand menu. That menu does have options for Apple TV+ and MLS Season Pass, as well as Home, Library, and Settings. It doesn’t allow you to sort by movies or TV shows, but you can do that fairly easily on the Apple TV+ home page instead.

Category switching score: 6.75 out of 10

Playback controls score

The playback controls on Apple TV+ are unique, and mostly in a good way. The streamer offers the standard fast-forward and rewind, the ability to skip ahead 10 seconds, pause, etc. Viewers will also see the subtitle and audio accessibility options in the playback controls for easy access.

On the bottom of the screen, viewers will see Info, InSight, and Continue Watching options. The Info button allows you to restart playback — something I wish wasn’t quite so buried in the controls — or dig into the show and watch trailers and bonus content with the More Info button. InSight is Apple’s answer to Amazon’s X-Ray feature for telling viewers more about the actors in a scene, and the music playing.

The Continue Watching option actually calls up your whole Continue Watching row, something I didn’t expect. It allows you to skip to the next episode of the title you’re currently streaming, or pick something else from your Continue Watching section. This was a choice I found just a little odd. Not bad, per se, I just don’t know that I’ve ever had the need to call up something else from my Continue Watching row with such immediacy while streaming something else.

Playback controls score: 8 out of 10

Is skipping opening and closing credits easy with Apple TV+?

The Skip Intro button comes up right away when an opening sequence starts on Apple TV+, but if you don’t catch it fast enough, it’s gone. You get a solid five seconds to press it, but if you miss the button, you have to manually skip through the opening credits on Apple TV+ instead.

Closing credits are a different story. You get a preview image of the next episode, and an auto-countdown bar shows you how long until it begins playing automatically. Fairly rudimentary process, but nothing wrong with it overall.

Ease of skipping credits score: 7 out of 10

Closing thoughts

I confess myself a tad disappointed at the Apple TV+ user interface. There was nothing wrong with it, really — everything did more or less what it was supposed to do, and I never find myself struggling when I use Apple TV+ in general. It’s all perfectly satisfactory as a streaming user experience.

I guess the disappointment comes in because I think of Apple TV+ as such a premium streaming service, and the user experience doesn’t really reflect that expectation. Maybe that’s a flaw of my own to work on, but I do think Apple TV+ can squeeze a little more juice from its UX if it cares to try.

Overall score: 7 out of 10