Apple TV app development

An iOS app does not become an Apple TV app by changing the deployment target. The code compiles, the screens appear, and then nobody can use it, because everything the app knew about the user's finger is now wrong. What transfers cleanly is everything under the interface: your models, your networking, your persistence, your business rules. If those are already separated from the view layer, a tvOS app is a new front end on a codebase you already own — and that is a genuinely different budget from starting over. What does not transfer is the interface, and not because of screen size. On iPhone the user touches the thing they want. On Apple TV there is no pointer: there is focus, a highlight the system moves between elements, and the focus engine decides where it goes. You do not move focus; you describe a layout the engine can reason about. That inversion is the whole job. The Siri Remote makes it sharper. Swiping is fast and imprecise, and newer remotes with a directional pad behave differently again from the glass touch surface. Both have to feel right. Then there are the things that exist only here: Top Shelf, the large area above your app in the top row of the home screen, which is a separate extension you have to build; sign-in without a keyboard, which is a design decision made early rather than a login screen ported from iOS; and on-device storage limits that mean content is streamed or fetched on demand by design.