Android TV app development

If you last looked at Android TV a few years ago, the advice you remember is now wrong. The Leanback UI toolkit that every tutorial was built around is deprecated, and Google's own guidance points at Compose for TV instead. A lot of what is still online will lead your team down a road Google has stopped maintaining. If you already have a Leanback app, that is not an emergency and it is not a rewrite either. A deprecated library keeps working; what it stops getting is new work. The sensible approach is usually to migrate screen by screen as each one comes up for change, rather than to stop feature work for a port. What carries over either way is everything below the UI: your Kotlin, your data layer, your playback logic, your integrations. The D-pad is the whole interface. Google's requirement is plain: a viewer must be able to navigate comfortably with just a directional pad and a select button. No touch, no pointer, no keyboard. Every focusable element needs a visible focused state and a sensible neighbour in four directions, and a phone app recompiled for TV fails here first, because anything that only responded to a tap is now dead. Getting onto the TV needs more than the APK. It needs a leanback launcher intent filter so the TV knows it is a TV app, a banner so it appears properly on the home screen, and a manifest that declares what hardware it does not need — a TV has no touchscreen, no telephony and often no camera. Miss those and the app either will not appear or will not install.