(July 2, 2026) – Every few years, a problem that’s been quietly annoying everyone finally gets solved, and it’s worth stopping to talk about why it mattered in the first place.
Remote-control navigation on CTV is one of those problems. It sounds simple: someone presses a direction on their remote, and focus should move to the next logical thing on screen. But if you’ve ever built a Smart TV app, you know it’s never that simple and it gets a lot messier the moment you’re building for more than one platform.
Apple TV and Android TV, in particular, have never played by the same rules. Apple’s focus engine is built around a touch-surface remote and its own opinionated model of what “focusable” means. Android TV is D-pad-driven, with a completely different focus-tree system underneath. Two philosophies, two APIs, two sets of edge cases — and if you wanted your navigation UX to feel equally polished on both, you were, in practice, building it twice.
We’d already solved a version of this problem on the web side. Norigin Spatial Navigation has been quietly powering directional navigation in web-based Smart TV apps for a while now — Samsung Tizen, LG webOS, Vizio, Hisense VIDAA — with a simple, hook-based API that a lot of developers seem to genuinely like (90,000+ monthly downloads later, we’ll take it as a compliment). But native Apple TV and Android TV development sat outside that story. Every team building for both still had to duplicate the work.
After a beta cycle this spring that put the library through real deployments and a lot of developer feedback, we’ve shipped a React Native version of Spatial Navigation that closes that gap. Same hooks, same mental model — `useFocusable`, `FocusContext` — now running natively on Apple TV and Android TV through a dedicated adapter built for how these platforms actually work.
That meant solving some real technical problems, not just wrapping an existing API. Layout measurement on native TV platforms is asynchronous in a way the web never had to worry about, so we rebuilt that part of the library from the ground up rather than forcing a synchronous model onto native views. We also added a way to override the default focus-resolution logic for teams building more complex navigation patterns — carousels, modals, anything where “just go to the nearest thing” isn’t quite right.
We’re admittedly biased, but we think this is a bigger deal than “we added TV support to a web library.” Device fragmentation is consistently one of the top costs broadcasters and OTT providers point to when we ask what’s slowing them down. Every platform-specific rewrite is time and budget that isn’t going toward the actual viewing experience. An open-source, shared navigation layer that behaves correctly across web and native TV platforms doesn’t just save our own teams time, it’s infrastructure the whole industry can build on instead of everyone solving the same problem in isolation, again.
Get in touch with us – we specialize in Smart TV and CTV app development across all major platforms, and we’d love to hear what you’re building!