Apple replaces Videos mobile app with TV — confuses iPad users

Apple isn’t as friendly or as as communicative as one would think. Earlier today, I received a panic call from someone trying to sync videos to her iPad from a Mac – and receiving a message that there was no suitable application on the iPad. Huh? That made no sense. The app for playing locally stored videos on an iPad is called Videos, and it’s a standard, built-in app. What’s the deal?

In short: With the iOS 10.2 operating system update, Apple renamed the Videos app to TV. And it has to be installed from the Apple App Store. It’s a free download, but who knew? Apparently not me. And not a lot of people who queried their favorite search engine with phrases like “ipad videos app missing.”

What’s worse, the change had the potential to delete locally stored video content. One dissatisfied user posted on an Apple discussion forum:

New TV App deleted home videos from iPad

I had a bunch of home videos on my iPad, and when I updated to iOS 10.2, the new TV App replaced videos. On my iPhone 6, this process went fine. I launched TV, and up popped the Library, and within it was a sub-menu for Home Videos. The one and only one I had on my iPhone is still there.

But I had dozens on my iPad and now they are all gone. Not only are they all gone, but there is no sub-menu for Home Videos AT ALL! I can probably replace them by synching to my laptop, but this is a time-consuming pain in the *$$, and why should I have to do this at all?

This change was unveiled in October 2016, with much fanfare, claiming:

Apple today introduced the new TV app, offering a unified experience for discovering and accessing TV shows and movies from multiple apps on Apple TV, iPhone and iPad. The TV app provides one place to access TV shows and movies, as well as a place to discover new content to watch. Apple also introduced a new Siri feature for Apple TV that lets viewers tune in directly to live news and sporting events across their apps. Watching TV shows and movies across Apple devices has never been easier.

The update appeared, for U.S. customers at least, on December 12, 2016. That’s when iOS 10.2 came out. Buh-bye, Videos app!

The change moved a piece of core functionality from iOS itself into an app. The benefits: The new TV app can be updated on its own schedule, not tied to iOS releases, and iOS releases themselves can be smaller. The drawback: Users must manually install the TV app.

Once the TV app is installed, the user can re-sync the videos from a Mac or Windows PC running iTunes. This should restore the missing content, assuming the content is on the desktop/notebook computer. How rude, Apple!

Let me add, snarkily, that the new name is stupid since there’s already a thing from Apple called TV – Apple TV.