New Amazon Prime Video app not compatible with some older versions of Apple TV operating system
September 17, 2022 by Paul McKeever
This is just a quick helpful tip to everyone whose Amazon Prime Video app (on your Apple TV box) has suddenly stopped working.
Fast answer: update your TVOS to the latest version (version 16), and update your Amazon Prime Video app to the latest version.
Explanation: Until today (September 17, 2022), my Apple TV video streaming box was running version 14.4 of the Apple TVOS operating system. My box was set to do automatic updates, but – apparently it hasn’t been updating. A little googling allowed me to discover that Apple has had numerous newer TVOS versions since version 14.4. This summer (2022), Apple released TVOS version 16.
Last night, I went to my Apple TV menu and clicked on the Amazon Prime Video app icon. Nothing happened. I tried all of the fixes found on youtube, including:
– I unplugged the Apple TV Box and plugged it back in: no change.
– I did a “hard reboot” of my Apple TV Box: no change.
– I deleted my Prime Video app, went to the Apple app store, and downloaded it. It installed. No change. Still not working.
Today, I decided to look at my Apple TV box’s operating system (TVOS) version number. I saw it to be version 14.4. Then I went to find a list of TVOS versions. The list contained many versions that follow 14.4. The most recent: version 16.
Then I did some googling about “compatibility” between the “prime video app” and “TVOS 16”. I found a news story about how Prime Video had – in mid August 2022 – released a new version of its app for Apple TV. The article said that the new Prime Video app is compatible with TVOS 16.
I can only imagine that, within the last few days, my Apple TV box updated the Prime Video app to the most recent version.
So I force-updated my TVOS by (a) turning off “automatic updates”, and (b) manually updating the TVOS to the most recent version (version 16). It took about 24 minutes to install. After it installed: tada! My Prime Video app now works.
Upshot: I think that the boneheads who made the Prime Video app didn’t take care to make it backwards compatible with older versions of the Apple TV operating system…and also didn’t bother to tell us that it isn’t compatible.
Anyway: best of luck to you if – like me – finding information about this incompatibility was elusive. Hopefully, this post will find you and help you to remedy your problem.
Cheers,
Paul
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