Twitter's Terrible New TV App

In an ongoing attempt to make Twitter the "everything app", Elon Musk has decided to take on YouTube. Earlier this year, it was announced that Twitter was going to become "video first", whatever that means. As part of that, some changes have already been made. On mobile by default, finishing a video will cause another one to start playing automatically. Vidoes uploaded can now be really long, multiple hours (if you pay for twitter, that is). However, it was also announced that Twitter would be launching a new platform: X TV.
This will be a complete take on YouTube. Anyways, the TV versions of these apps recently dropped on Android TV, so I want to check them out, because I know they will be terrible. Note that I don't have an Android TV, so I am using an emulator in Android Studio.

X TV is a terrible, rushed app. There isn't much to talk about, because there isn't much to the app in the first place.
The main page is the "Home" page, which contains videos selected by the algorithm. Every video here is at least a minute long, and is either a completely random video, a trending video, or a right wing political video.

Because of the way Twitter works, you will see the same video multiple times in the feed from different accounts. I counted the Minecraft movie trailer in my feed 4 different times.
For some reason, the homepage is divided into separate rows, each of which have 5 videos that can be scrolled through. This is strange because each row isn't a topic, there is no reason to have scrolling in the first place.
Another thing you will notice is that the only thing that is shown are views, Tweet body, timestamp, duration, and author. Only showing the view count is a clear indicator of what Elon is trying to do to engagement on Twitter. At the bottom of the homepage, you can find your bookmarked videos. A really strange place to put them for sure.
Anyways, lets check out the remaining pages. There is a following page, which just shows videos from people you follow. These videos can be of any length.

While I was writing this, the following page changed. Now, it just shows whatever. I'm guessing it's showing what the homepage is supposed to be. Also, view counts got hidden from the home page in the same update. Cool.

A fun thing is that you cannot access the sidebar while on the following page. You have to press back on the remote.
Next is search. This is where I started to get annoyed with this app. Instead of supporting the TV OS keyboard, you HAVE to use the buttons the app provides. This means you cannot use external keyboards, microphones, or anything else. Even apps that make use of custom keyboards support these features.

Finally, there is a profile page, which just shows your profile. There is not much to see there. Anyways, lets check out the actual video watching experience.
The video page is about as dry as you would expect. It's just a copy of the interface for TV YouTube. A weird thing is that likes have been replaced by a thumbs up.

Some videos do have closed captions, but not that many. You can also see the replies to a video. You cannot see replies to replies, or any engagement counts.

Finally, you can scroll down and see related videos. That's about all you can do.

However, that's not all. The mobile app has some changes made for longer videos too. I don't know when this is triggered, but a clearly YouTube inspired interface appears for videos that I'm guessing are over 10 mintes.

So, yeah, this is all super unnecessary, but Elon is just going to keep on adding useless stuff nobody will ask for. But judging by the reviews, the app already is a hit among people who fight for freedom of speech so they can be racist. If only they would try Tweeting the word "cis".