The Shield at launch was an amazing product - premium UX and hardware, premium price point. Google changed the experience to an ad-loaded mess without providing an opt out for those who had spent hundreds of dollars on the Shield.

I was dogfooder, a huge advocate of the product, and someone who had convinced others to buy the Shield and Android TV devices. That UX revamp and how the team treated their customers (internal and external) turned me off the product for life. I tried the various competitors (XBox, Roku, Amazon) before landing on Apple TV. I now own two Apple TV devices - both of which are still getting updates many years after I bought them - and will continue using them for as long as the product line is maintained.

People in this thread have talked about Apple's clean beautiful ad-free UX, but the apps themselves are far better. Apple sets customer-friendly App Store requirements *and enforces them*. That means:

* The back button always works. It will bring you back to the home page of the app and then to the system launcher. It will not get stuck in an endless loop of "are you sure you want to quit?" and just dismissing that dialog like multiple Android apps do

* No loud obtrusive sounds on app startup (YouTube, Netflix)

* The apps are first-class priorities for developers. Circa 2019, the Paramount+ app was an inconsistent mess where subtitles were broken on some platforms. The Plex app wouldn't transcode certain formats on the XBox, and so on. None of these issues are a problem on Apple TV. Not every app is perfect (Dropout, I love your content, but your app is awful), but none of them are worse than on any competing platform.

Apple TV is a truly incredible product and ecosystem and one that feels like a joy to use. That's not the case for Android TV (now Google TV, I think?) even with a custom launcher.