HBO Max has seen your tweets about all the issues with its app design and wants you to know they’re going to fix it.
Last month, AT&T reported a strong quarter for its streaming service, with HBO and HBO Max combined at 67.5 million subscribers at the end of Q2. In the company’s earnings report, CEO John Stankey shared that AT&T was raising its global subscriber forecast to 70 to 73 million subscribers by the end of the year.
While the streaming service is delivering some of the year’s best original content and seeing growth beyond the company’s expectations, the app has seen a series of issues that have led subscribers to social media to make jokes and complaints.
Problems subscribers have found with app range from playback issues to buffering to crashing every time they start playing a show or movie.
A senior WarnerMedia exec says they’re very aware of the comments and the issues behind the jokes. “We see the crash logs,” he told Vulture. “We’re not blind to it.”
The exec points to the launch of the ad-supported tier as the time when most of the glitches popped up, along with the launch of the app in international markets. However, some problems were there from the start as HBO Max was developed from the existing HBO Go and HBO Now services. The current app has a much larger audience around the world and much more content which the original apps weren’t designed for.
The WarnerMedia exec told Vulture that the company is planning to roll out an all new app “in the next four to five months,” made to meet the needs to the new audience, content library, and subscription model.
“It will be wildly better than what’s out there,” the unnamed exec said. “It will just work better across the board.” Hopefully, HBO Max subscribers will see a more usable app soon. And for those who just want an interface that looks better, the exec also promised future changes to make the app “sophisticated and cool and sexier.”